the 19th century, Americans became more aware of the poverty in their midst. Today I’d like to talk about how 21st century America masks its poverty. How the richest nation in the history of humanity normalizes a permanent class of impoverished citizens.
One of the ways Americans dismisses poverty is by subsidizing it. Critics on the right often point to social welfare policies as perpetuating cycles of poverty. They maintain that programs like welfare and food stamps might be well meaning, but that they have the effect of making poverty just palatable enough for people to endure it, thereby taking away people’s incentives to improve themselves.
I disagree with much of this critique, but I will say this. One cannot go to a neighborhood like West Baltimore, where decades of drug trade have wrought absolute devastation, and not notice that much of that trade is indirectly subsidized by federal, state, and local social welfare programs. Neighborhoods like this are profoundly broken. The schools are broken, the local economy is broken, many of the families are broken, and countless individuals are broken. The damage is so widespread and severe that no one even seems to have an 
answer as to how to fix it. And at the end of the day, government programs do play an important role in keeping the neighborhood afloat. So indirectly, in extreme examples like this, welfare ends up subsidizing a cycle of dysfunction that has no end in sight.
However, there’s another critique about the ways in which we subsidize poverty in this country, and it’s not about failed government policies. It’s about the failures of the free market.
The de-industrialization of America is an old story at this point. Free market policies have contributed to the decline of good-paying jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Most of those jobs have been shipped overseas, and now the average hourly worker in this country only makes a little over $10/hour in real wages.
The supposed counter to this is that, while some U.S. workers have been hurt by the loss of good blue collar jobs, they have also benefitted on the backside as consumers. The idea is that wages may have gone down, but so have prices.
But when you stop to think about it, this means everything’s going down. It’s the so-called race to the bottom, and it has the effect of subsidizing poverty.
A proliferation of Walmarts, dollar stores, and the like in poor areas does in fact mean cheaper prices on many goods. However, it also means an inferior quality for many of those same products. Poor people can afford to buy cheap crap that breaks. They purchase stuff that we might define as semi-disposable goods. In theory, they’re durable goods: vacuum cleaners, toasters, clocks, furniture and so forth. In reality, much of it is poorly made, it won’t last long, and everyone knows it.
Something snaps, something tears, and pretty soon it’s broken. Instead of lasting twenty years, it lasted five. And so while it cost half the price of a comparable item of higher quality, you might have to buy four of them during the same amount of time that the good one lasts. Thus, the reduction in prices on consumer goods has often gone hand in hand with a reduction in quality. This in turn ends up subsidizing poverty, and it does so in a rather insidious and underhanded way. When the things poor people buy end up costing more in the long run than the quality made stuff that they can’t afford, then the situation actually becomes an impediment to people working their way out of poverty.
Furthermore, the availability of dirt-cheap consumer goods is making poverty acceptable. Because it’s easy to ignore poverty if you just assume that poor people have everything they need. Stuff’s cheap, and even poor 
people can afford it, right? Nothing to worry about, nothing for anyone to complain about.
But here’s the rub. If poverty is perpetuated when people lose the incentive to do better, if subsidizing poverty turns it into a vicious cycle, and if no one’s particularly inclined to do anything about poverty when poor people can kind of get by, then we have to confront the reality of the situation.
When you’re talking about just getting by in America, you’re talking about Welfare and Walmart.