Poverty in America

K-shaped Economy (artwork: R Stephenson)

I hope everyone gets a chance to read Nick Kristof's report on poverty: Meet the Americans Who Can't Afford Haircuts or Toilet Paper. Kristof puts a human face on the poverty that affects millions of our neighbors across this country. The people he interviews are struggling in ways many  of us have never experienced. And as his reporting makes clear, people end up in poverty for many reasons—childhood trauma, low wages, unstable housing, poor health and systems that too often fail people when they most need help.

Kristof also addresses personal responsibility, because that's usually where the conversation about poverty stops in America. Of course, personal choices matter. But so does our collective responsibility for whether children grow up with enough food, vulnerable people are cared for, people have access to decent health care and everyone has a reasonable chance to build a good life.

For me, that responsibility is rooted in Christian faith. Jesus calls us to love our neighbors. The Bible repeatedly calls us to care for people who are poor and vulnerable, and to seek justice. Our responsibility can't end with private charity. We also have to ask whether our policies and institutions make it easier for people to escape poverty.

That question is especially urgent now. We are living in an increasingly K-shaped economy. As Kristof points out, many Americans are thriving, while those at the bottom struggle to afford basic necessities. Yet rather than investing more in struggling families, the Trump administration and Congress are cutting the safety net and throwing decades of progress in reverse.

More than 4.5 million people have lost SNAP benefits since last year's reconciliation law took effect—the steepest drop in food assistance in nearly 30 years, at a time when the cost of living keeps rising. Medicaid lost more than $900 billion under that same law, with the administration's new rules piling on hundreds of billions more in cuts. At the same time, the administration is handing out large tax breaks that disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans and corporations.

And now the administration is pouring resources into an unpopular war that has already cost taxpayers more than $29 billion. The president's latest budget request would push nondefense spending to its lowest share of the economy since the Eisenhower administration, while calling for a $445 billion increase in military spending in a single year. That is the largest such increase outside a ground war in our history.  

These are choices about our national priorities. They are especially troubling because we know poverty is not inevitable. The extent of poverty in America is a choice we make through the policies we enact and the priorities we set.

We know this because we have made better choices in the past. I discuss this in Poverty Abolitionists. Nearly half the decline in U.S. poverty between 1967 and 2024 came from the Great Society programs President Lyndon Johnson enacted. We kept improving our safety-net programs, with more emphasis on children and incentives to work. Child poverty fell by half between 1993 and 2019. The poverty rate has never returned to anywhere near what it was before the Johnson administration.

We saw the power of public policy again during the COVID-19 pandemic. When millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs, Congress responded with expanded assistance, including the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. Many expected poverty to spike. Instead, the country saw a historic drop in child poverty. When Congress let those provisions expire, poverty rose again.

We know that the government cannot do everything. Churches, charities, businesses, and community organizations do things the government cannot do well—especially building personal relationships that help people find opportunity and rebuild their lives. But private charity cannot substitute for effective public policy either. We need both.

Kristof's stories are heartbreaking. I don't believe despair is the right response. Poverty is a solvable problem. We know many of the policies that work. We also know advocacy can change public policy. Even in today's difficult political environment, people of faith and conscience can speak up for programs that protect children and families and create opportunity.

The question is not whether America knows how to reduce poverty. We do. The question is whether we have the moral and political commitment to do it.