Welcome to The Poverty Trap, a newsletter and podcast for people who are fed up with the inequality baked into America’s system and want to individually and collectively make change.
I put together an end-of-month, link round-up highlighting a few of my favorite Substacker’s recent posts, and one from The Poverty Trap published in September of last year. I believe there’s a common thread running through the first three posts — outside of Robert Reich’s call to action — a question I’ve been researching and writing about for the last 10 years or so: What is it, exactly, about the American system that it chooses not to help the poor in any significant way, in fact, to punish the poor and at the same time help the rich get richer by our laws, policy choices, and perhaps most powerfully, our myths about the poor. I think these posts will give us some clarity.
— First up is a great piece from
, which discusses the alleged virtues of working long hours for low pay…and examines why we think this is a good thing.I have worked a list of shit jobs a mile long. None of them built my character. But we have concocted all kinds of myths in order to convince poor people to do shitty jobs for low wages so that the upper classes can enjoy the cheap labor of poor people and their children.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-162418827
— Speaking of punishing the poor…
written by Jerremy Ney, recently published a detailed post explaining why President Trump’s tariffs are a tax on the poor:The Trump administration is largely of the belief that tariffs may hurt Wall Street but benefit Main Street. We’ve heard this consistently in talking points, but it is far from the truth. Not only do lower income or middle class Americans also own stock typically through their 401K plans, but they will also suffer higher prices for all goods because tariffs don’t happen in a vacuum — other countries respond, high walls means goods need to go somewhere else, and tariffs are effectively a consumption tax, which disproportionately impacts low-income Americans who spend a larger share of their earnings on consumption.
— Shortly after the democratic convention last year, I wrote about Michelle Obama’s incredible speech where she discussed the impact of “generational wealth” and how it amounted to affirmative action for the rich. Here’s what I said about keeping the poor, poor regarding admissions to elite colleges, which can set its graduates on the path to wealth:
If a prospective student is fortunate enough to be born into a family that could not only afford to send their child or children to an elite college, but who also had attended that same elite college and/or was able to make donations to the institution’s endowment fund, that student literally got a boost in the admissions process, an extra check mark next to their name that will be considered when deciding whether that student gets the opportunity to enter its hallowed grounds…and a leg up in earning the money their parents did.
Generational Wealth Has Always Been An Unacknowledged Form Of Affirmative Action...
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— It may be helpful to end this link round-up with a call to action from
at the 100 day mark of Trump’s second presidency, a presidency that has done nothing but cater to the rich and trounce the lowest wage earners and what’s left of our country’s middle class. He discusses how elected officials, major players and regular folks can come together to stop our slide into an authoritarian regime:Friends, we have witnessed what can happen in just the first hundred days. I’m not at all sure we can wait until the 2026 midterm elections and cross our fingers that Democrats take back at least one chamber of Congress. At the rate this regime is wreaking havoc, too much damage will have been done by then.
The nation is tottering on the edge of dictatorship.
We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground.
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I’d love to hear what you think about each of these posts, and how and why our country still operates based on myths about the poor, and why our country quite literally punishes the poor for their lack of money. Please share your ideas in the Comment Section below:
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