Don't overthink poverty in the United States

Our welfare state programs work well, but they are relatively stingy

I found Matthew Desmond’s piece on poverty for the New York Times Magazine to be vexing, over-complicated, and in key respects, outright wrong. Most things in life require a degree of nuance, but the truth about comparative poverty in the U.S. is genuinely very simple: the absolute poverty rate in the United States is unusually high for a rich country because our welfare state is stingy. If we had a generous universal (or universal-ish) cash assistance program for parents and children, the poverty rate would be much lower. If our existing programs for elderly, disabled, and unemployed…

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