Poor Choices...

I just finished a really interesting and also disheartening book; Poverty, by America.

The basic premise was that in a nation as wealthy as the United States the only reason why anyone is poor is by design of the system. He breaks down all of the "well they're poor because" tropes and why they aren't the reasons. Immigration, welfare dependence, they just want to be...all of those things. The things that if you've ever been poor you already knew were bullshit, and yet they persist.

He also talked about how much government financial dependence, the real welfare payouts go to the upper middle class and the wealthy. Again, not anything you didn't already know if you were the sort of person drawn to reading a book called Poverty, by America.

But I'm not sure I had connected all of the dots that he did, and I know for sure I hadn't thought of all of the things he had to address the issues. And he had great examples of what worked during Covid and how that blew the doors off of a lot of the arguments about what could actually be done that would work to address poverty in the United States.

Which is where it got disheartening.

The book was published in 2023.

It was a different world in 2023. A lot of the programs he talked about that do work, have been dismantled. A lot of the things he talked about extending or expanding are gone. He also said one of the hardest things to overcome when getting people who aren't poor to worry about poor people enough to pass laws to help them is scarcity mindset.

That feeling that you don't have enough so you can't give away what you have to someone else. There is only so much pie and I'm not going to starve. And we are all about to have a lot more of that feeling. Hell, I've already noticed it more and more in my own head and we are still fine. But the threat of what is happening in the economy tied to what is happening at Intel has put me into that head space.

We're only a few months into this presidency. Assuming that we do have free and fair elections again we have most of it to go. Optimistically (very optimistically) we might be able to stop the sledgehammer falling after midterms, but by then all that will be left is rubble anyway so...

So the best case scenario we have is that we do still have elections. Midterms clean out Congress and stop the destruction, then a new president comes in and we have to rebuild.

While all of us are shell shocked and holding on to whatever we have left with both hands.

The damage being done is not something that I think any of us have the scope to fully understand. The time it's going to take to rebuild is beyond my imagination right now. But maybe, just maybe if all goes well we can have more people who understand what works and what doesn't to help rebuild. To make a system that isn't designed to keep some people poor.

Even though I'm not sleeping well I think it's a good dream.