What You Don’t Know About Poverty

About 11% of Americans have a household income that puts them below the official government threshold for poverty. Is poverty a state of being, or a risk? Are the poor people themselves the root cause of poverty? Or are they the outcome of a low-wage labor market that churns people in and out of work? Because how you diagnose the problem matters if you’re looking for solutions. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards tackles three major misconceptions about poverty. Support the Optimist Economy podcast by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/, or donating at https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:43Robin Rauzi?

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• 1:09Robin Rauzi?

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• 1:32Robin Rauzi?

  Just looping back on that.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Just gonna circle back to that. I mean, consider for a moment, y'all, like, if we're this awkward asking people who like us for money, can you imagine how well we're doing with, like, rich donors?

• 1:46Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah. No, we'll get there. We'll get there.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  We'll get there. We're gonna get there.

• 1:50Robin Rauzi?

  And I really, I should point out that there are actually hundreds of you who have given us money in varying amounts, and it's really heartening, and it really is making a difference for us. So, thank you.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Optimist, we cannot thank you enough. Every little dollar amount, it's not just how much it supports production of the show, but just how reaffirming it is for Robin and I that we're talking into a microphone, but we are connecting with people, and so it means a ton. Now, we don't want to play favorites, but someone did give money to the show with the note, "My estate attorney shall be in touch." Signed, Jeff Bezos's son.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I do think the best part was that whoever wrote this didn't bother looking up Jeff Bezos' son and neither did we.

• 2:42Robin Rauzi?

  That was excellent.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  That was, that really made my day.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  My estate attorney will be in touch. Thank you so much, y'all. So, again, I don't even think that person gave us, like, he didn't give us a Jeff Bezos-type donation, but it was, it was the, what he really gave us was affirmation and a very good laugh.

• 3:00Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. And don't we all need that these days?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Okay, RETCON.

• 3:06Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, I actually had an announcement.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yep.

• 3:09Robin Rauzi?

  Which I put in the outline, jump out. No, I just wanted to add that we have, on Substack, we have an Optimist Chat. And so if you are a paid subscriber on Substack, you can join our chat room. It's like a group chat of other optimists. And we took some people's questions from there, but also it's just, you know, if you're looking for a place to vent after the show, feel free to go there.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Wait, so now RETCON?

• 3:33Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, wait, I wanted to say one other thing.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  God, oh, come on, really?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I feel like I've got the outline pulled up and I'm just like, I'm ready to, I'm ready to stay on task.

• 3:42Robin Rauzi?

  Let me talk. I haven't talked yet. I haven't talked enough. Crap, okay.

• 3:49Robin Rauzi?

  No, all I wanted to say is somebody suggested we put all of the executive orders online and I did that. That's it.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  That's so cool. Sorry, I didn't know that you did that. That's my gentleman reaction. Wait, so can we vote on them?

• 4:00Robin Rauzi?

  Do you want, what do you want? You want other people to vote on them?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  We should vote on them and see, we could have some, like, maybe some type of, like, upvote scenario to see, like, what is the most popular executive order? Because I'm like, leaf blowers, it's gotta be leaf blowers.

• 4:13Robin Rauzi?

  I'm not saying that Substack is a very simple rudimentary platform, but it kind of is. I'll see if we can do that.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:20Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. First up is RETCON.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:23Robin Rauzi?

  RETCON stands for retroactive continuity for our new listeners. And this is where we reflect on things that we said in previous episodes. And this week, we're looking back at our minimum wage episode.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  First red con about the minimum wage has to do with the state of Missouri. We referenced in the last episode that it had raised its minimum wage above the federal, and its Senator Josh Hawley is leading the Republican effort to raise the federal minimum wage, which of course, Robin and I have complex feelings about. However, I mischaracterized and said that it was the legislature that had raised the wage, and it was certainly not. That was put in a voter referendum that carried with 57%, and it also included paid sick days. So Missouri voters, in a not small majority, voted for a higher minimum wage and paid sick days, and they are currently in a very complex legal fight of the legislature is trying to walk it back, veto it.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  And I think the minimum wage and the paid sick days, they're on separate tracks of being overturned from the popular vote.

• 5:26Robin Rauzi?

  That's optimistic.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  I mean, okay, there is some optimism here that Missouri voted for paid sick days, right? These are popular policies.

• 5:34Robin Rauzi?

  Paid sick days and a higher minimum wage.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Yes, we are not talking about like, some kind of a crazy fantasy world that three people agree with. Like, these subjects that we talk about are often supported by the vast majority of Americans.

• 5:45Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, larger majorities than a lot of major legislation has passed by, certainly.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  And, just the final part of that red con is that I said last time Hawley went back down in my book, and like, there he goes, just went back down again.

• 5:58Robin Rauzi?

  And I think the other thing that we didn't say is that the Higher Wages for Americans Act is in fact indexed to go up in future years, according to the Consumer Price Index for urban workers, or something. It's a very specific, it seemed very specific to me, but maybe you know what it is.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  There's dozens of price indices that you can use, so, this is the CPIU.

• 6:21Robin Rauzi?

  But it is indexed to prices, not to wages, which is one of the things we talked about.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:28Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. Terms and conditions is next.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I have a goofy one.

• 6:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, would you look up?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  I looked up the phrase, "The worm has turned."

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I was commissioned to write an article for a magazine and the editor sent it back to me with edits that included the insertion of the phrase, "The worm has turned." And I was like,

• 6:47Robin Rauzi?

  What?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I certainly hadn't written that because I have no idea what that means. And it means it's used to talk about a situation that can suddenly change so that a person who has been weak, unlucky, unsuccessful, can become strong, lucky, successful, et cetera. I don't have the OED. I don't get to tell you guys on the journey that went from "A worm has turned" to "The weak person is now strong." I mean, we can fill it in. It feels like Middle Ages. I don't know. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, we can actually guess. I'm gonna say that this is a Middle Ages thing. It's gonna be farming. It might involve cruelty to children or people.

• 7:23Robin Rauzi?

  I'm gonna say it's from a book. I'm gonna text Amy right now and say, "Look up..."

• 7:29Speaker 02

  "The worm has turned?"

• 7:30Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. "Look up 'The worm has turned.'"

• 7:33Speaker 02

  All right. Well, we're gonna look up where "The worm has turned" has come from. And then, next episode, tune in to the thrill.

• 7:39Robin Rauzi?

  We're gonna have this answer before this we're done recording. Amy's gonna be my spiritual sponsor if she finds this out.

• 7:47Robin Rauzi?

  Needed in an hour.

• 7:50Robin Rauzi?

  We had a term, a term and condition request from Dustin Edwards, who's a listener and subscriber to our show, about the phrase "blue sky." I think this might be because you talked about your blue sky report on child development. There were these things called "blue sky laws." And not to be confused, by the way, with just "blue laws." So, blue laws are basically about selling alcohol and not selling alcohol, on Sundays in particular. Blue sky laws were, was a term from the early 20th century that banned selling things that were worthless, like stock in the blue sky, right? Selling things that were, had no value.

• 8:31Robin Rauzi?

  And they were, so, blue sky laws are consumer protection laws, but specifically related to financial markets.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Awesome. What a great origin. Thank God.

• 8:40Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. But that's not related to the origin of the idea of a blue sky policy or a blue sky research. Blue sky research means basically to think about ideas without consequence. And it was kind of initially used a little negatively, but has become very positive to imagine things that are fanciful or hypothetical, maybe not particularly practical, but also without limit and brainstorming and without dealing with the nitty gritty of implementation or clouds in the sky metaphorically.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  And Dustin, in DC policy circles, it comes up when you want to talk about a policy and you don't want to have to talk about how politically unpalatable it is in the current moment. It's a way to be like, can we do blue sky? Like, I don't want to hear about how like Republicans have the super majority and so therefore like will never have childcare. Like this problem needs to be fixed and so let's talk about how we're going to fix it and not how we're going to sell it. That's how it comes up in my world a lot is it's code for like, please, I don't want to talk about the current Congress.

• 9:46Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  So this could have been, this could have been another name for our show. Instead of Optimist Economy, it could have been Blue Sky Economy.

• 9:54Robin Rauzi?

  It's true, but I think a social media company took that.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Okay, sure. I see now, I see now. Optimist, the centerpiece today is poverty and we're talking about poverty in America. And I want to preface this by saying that when I was in grad school and getting my PhD, there was a very staid research institute at Wisconsin called the Institute for Research on Poverty and they were taking applications for graduate fellows. And this opened the path for mentorship and funding. And so I put in this really thoughtful application and I got in, was very excited. And I asked the director of the Poverty Institute, I was like, you know, I'm just, I'm really glad that you all accepted me. And she's like, well, we try not to like turn people away from poverty. She's like, you can see the optics of trying to make poverty elitist, you know?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  And she's like, and nobody really cares about it.

• 10:47Robin Rauzi?

  So we're trying to We're the only applicants.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  We try, we try to make it seem like people who earnestly care about poverty aren't good enough because we really need more people in this space. And I was like, oh, okay, that's a really good point. Poverty needs to be approachable and fun.

• 11:05Robin Rauzi?

  What's what she said, you're like, poverty's fun. And I was like, not if you're in it, but okay.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, that part. But yeah, at the start of every class, I used to teach a graduate class on poverty. And the first lecture, I was always like, y'all are going to have a lot of fun here, which I know sounds bad, but like, I can't make this too depressing or none of you would study it or bother to learn about poverty in the US. And trust, trust me, you don't know anything about it. And all the stuff you do know is really wrong.

• 11:36Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  So let's just make this a positive, good time. I'm sure some of them were, I mean, I'm sure that the students in my class thought I was insane.

• 11:47Robin Rauzi?

  Maybe not.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  As I'm carrying through the mantle of like, who's excited about poverty? It's so, they're like, I think just the optics are bad enough that you have to go like all the way back around of like leaning.

• 11:58Robin Rauzi?

  Just leaning into how absurd that sounds? Is that what you're saying?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:00Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, my guess is you're right that people don't understand poverty. I'm sure I don't understand a lot of facets of poverty. So, you know.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 12:10Robin Rauzi?

  Let's talk about things that you think you know about poverty that you do not.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Yes. So I think there's three.

• 12:15Robin Rauzi?

  It's like a BuzzFeed, it's like a BuzzFeed article.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  It's a listicle.

• 12:18Robin Rauzi?

  It's a listicle.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  It's a BuzzFeed listicle with gifs. The poverty listicle, that's going to haunt me. So.

• 12:27Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  We wanted to talk about poverty because so much of social and economic policy in the US is either directly or indirectly passing judgment on poor people. So the one big beautiful bill cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid. And most of those cuts were concentrated amongst what we call the expansion population, which was the people who were brought into Medicaid coverage in states that had expanded Medicaid eligibility. And the way that they are all going to lose their coverage is through work requirements. And Mike Johnson himself, the Speaker of the House, said, work is good for you. You find dignity in work. People who don't work, we're going to get their attention.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  And that was how he described cutting Medicaid.

• 13:16Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  So that is a blatant judgment that these are lazy people.

• 13:24Robin Rauzi?

  And an assumption that those, that the people getting Medicaid don't work, but.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  An assumption that they don't work, but I think it goes back to the misconception that people have of poor people, which I'll say poverty and poor people somewhat interchangeably, but the misconception people have is really threefold. First, that there is a permanent underclass of poor people in the United States. They're born poor, they've always been poor, they always will be poor, their parents were probably poor, as their children will be. It's like this group of poor people, and they exist kind of in perpetuity. The second misconception is that these people don't work.

• 14:00Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  And the third misconception is they don't have to work because they're living off the government.

• 14:05Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  And I think something like Johnson's comment of like, we're going to get these people's attention is very telling of like, he basically thinks there's a bunch of people living off the fat of the land that is government spending and that they should go out and get a job.

• 14:18Robin Rauzi?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  So each of those three things are categorically wrong.

• 14:22Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  And in fact, it's not even that they're a little wrong, like, they're mostly wrong. They're so nondescriptive of the actual population in poverty that it, to me, reads like lying.

• 14:34Robin Rauzi?

  Are we going to go through these one at a time?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 14:36Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:38Robin Rauzi?

  Are you ready?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:41Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  So, part one.

• 14:43Robin Rauzi?

  Permanent underclass.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Permanent underclass, the set of people who exist who are poor that are separate from the rest of us. Not true at all. The way to understand this is to understand that poverty in the United States, poverty everywhere, is a very simple function of, I'm going to decide an income level below which you are poor, and then I'm going to look at your income and see if you are poor or not poor.

• 15:04Robin Rauzi?

  That's how economists do it.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  And census bureaus.

• 15:07Robin Rauzi?

  And census bureaus, okay.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when we count who is poor in the United States, we're essentially counting resources that go into a household and then determining if they are above or below a threshold that we have agreed means poor.

• 15:19Robin Rauzi?

  Which is the poverty line.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yes, which is we refer to as the poverty line or the poverty threshold.

• 15:24Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And it's just an income level below which your house is deemed to be poor. The income level varies with the number of people. So for one person, it's about $16,000 a year. For two, it's 21. For three, it's 25. For four, it's 32. I rounded just so it would not be quite as confusing to read off all those dollar amounts. But the specific poverty line also varies by whether or not the people in your household are over 65 or under 18.

• 15:53Robin Rauzi?

  Children and elders are less expensive?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, the amount of money to keep people out of poverty varies by their age. And that goes into the poverty line calculation. So the poverty line is actually about like 50 numbers.

• 16:04Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  That we apply to your household income based on what your household looks like. If you ever wanted to know anything about poverty in the United States, the first place you would go is the US Census Bureau Poverty Desk. Because they are charged with officially counting poverty in the US. And then they do probably some of the best research in the country about it. So they looked at monthly poverty. So if you take these like $16,000 a year and put it into a monthly amount of income, you can look at the actual duration of a poverty spell. If someone becomes poor, how long do they stay poor? And so they basically said, okay, assume that a poverty spell to be an actual spell has to be at least two months.

• 16:40Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Let's look at 48 months of income for tens of thousands of households. Over that time period, just 2% of households were poor in every month. And 34% of households were poor at least one spell.

• 16:56Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, that is fascinating. Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So the danger of saying things like poverty is a permanent underclass is not just like taking this relatively rare population and making them into a caricature of all people, but it is ignoring the fact that poverty is a risk. And it's a risk that a third of Americans face over a four-year period. It's so much more pervasive and so many more people fall into it. So when you fall into poverty, about half of people will get out before the year is up.

• 17:29Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Now, if you're shocked to hear this, you should know that this is something that we've known for a very long time. If you looked at women on welfare, back when we still had welfare entitlements, this is also what welfare recipients looks like. Same type of cultural myth that women are on it and they turn 16 and have a baby to get on it. And then like their daughter gets on it at 16 and it's a bunch of just like multi-generational teenage moms.

• 17:51Robin Rauzi?

  Baby Ponzi scheme.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  It's a baby Ponzi scheme and when they want to buy something, they have another baby so they get more welfare. Always been a lie, always been contested by data that showed poverty is a function of labor market volatility. People losing their jobs, people falling out of work, and it ends when they find a job. Now, that was a four-year monthly study, so they had 48 data points. Another set of researchers did something similar, but they looked at 10 years of annual income from IRS tax returns. So now they're going to do the same thing, they're going to look at households. What share of households had an income tax filing in which their income was below poverty? And it's four in 10.

• 18:31Robin Rauzi?

  It's not that dissimilar, I guess. What did you say, 34% on the other study? But four in 10 had a year where they were at poverty levels or below poverty levels.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, the things that are associated with a big drop in income are typically job loss and family dissolution.

• 18:47Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  So you're in a two-earning household, or you're in a one-earning household, but you're the non-earner and you get divorced, or someone leaves, or someone moves out, someone loses a job. I mean, it's truly just there's less money flowing into a household.

• 19:02Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  And for what it's worth, I talk a lot about poverty on my social media channels where I try to do a lot of, not like myth busting so much as like. Why don't we bring some receipts about what's actually going on? And I've always been overwhelmed by the number of people who will write in the comments their own experience of like, man, my mom left my dad and like, we had to get on food stamps and like, we barely ate, but we got out of it. That's the modal experience. I mean, in some ways, what bothers me so much about this misconception is that like, y'all, America is really resilient. American households are incredibly resilient. The number of people who fall down and pick themselves up is such a success of our economy. I mean, not great that our economy sends so many down, but amazing that so many people pop back up.

• 19:48Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  And it's almost in spite of their government sometimes because we demonize these people and we're like, so ready to judge what is in fact, a very common experience. I mean, you're talking to 30, 40% of the population is going to have some type of poverty spell probably a year long.

• 20:04Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  We could actually design a better public safety net and better social welfare system with the understanding that it is a result of income volatility.

• 20:14Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  So that's, I think that permanent underclass is like, the most important myth to shatter, the most wrong part of your conceptions of poverty. I will say, there is a statistic that people will throw back at me when I say this, which is that if you look at people in poverty, most of them have been poor for a long time. Their average spell is much, much longer. So this is called the hospital metaphor.

• 20:36Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  This is actually a very good way to understand poverty duration.

• 20:40Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Most of the time, people don't stay in the hospital that long, but people who are in the hospital, a lot of them have been there a long time. Poverty is like that. Most people aren't poor for that long, but if you were to kind of look at poor people, a lot of them have been there a long time. And those two things are not in contradiction to each other.

• 20:58Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm. Yeah, that is a challenging thing to hold in your head.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  It is, and I think that that's a nuance that's hard for people to understand. And if you don't like people in poverty, or don't want to help them, you can latch on to a statistic that looks much worse based on who you're looking at.

• 21:12Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  We have 37 million people in poverty in the US last year, about 11% of the total population. That number has not changed much over the past 40 years. It tends to bounce between 11 and 15% based on how the economy is doing. Always goes up in recessions, tends to fall afterwards. This kind of goes right into the second myth, which is that the reason why people are poor is because they don't work.

• 21:37Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  And I think there's a couple of ways to dispel that. The first is that you need to know that the poorest people in the US are children and the least poor people in the US are the elderly. And your idea of like, poor people don't work, you're kind of assigning poverty in the US to what you think working age adults should do, ignoring the two other sides of the population, one which we have decided to subsidize and keep out of poverty and do a very good job at, on the elderly side, and one that we don't do that.

• 22:06Robin Rauzi?

  Do not as great a job, yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  That we don't do that because their parents need to get a job. And so, kids are the most poor. And it trends with age.

• 22:14Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I think when we think about poverty, like criticizing groups in poverty, we don't think that children get counted.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Children do get counted. They are very poor. So, the second myth that people who are poor don't work, it gets at this idea that like, well, we have increasing income volatility in the US. Income volatility just means that your income isn't predictable month to month, which happens if you have irregular hours, irregular income, or you transition between employment. And people at the bottom are more likely to have all three scenarios.

• 22:44Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  They're both in high turnover industries that don't have set hours and their income is not fixed or predictable.

• 22:53Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  So, just to give you some idea of what I'm talking about, there are 157 million 18 to 64 year olds in the US and 20 million of them are poor.

• 23:05Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Keep in mind that it's like 37 million people who are poor overall. So, just to give you a sense of the number of children in poverty.

• 23:13Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have 20 million people in the US who are 18 to 64 years old and poor. And 7 million of them are working. And in fact, 2 million of them work full time, full year. And 5 million of them work but less than full time, full year. So, 35% of the adult poor population has a job.

• 23:35Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  The 13 million who aren't working and there are adults, this population is going to have an incredibly high disability rate. Some of them are going to qualify for disability and some of them are not. So disability in the US has more than one definition, both lived and operationalized. So the supplemental security income is a cash program for very poor disabled people. It has a disability test. Social Security Disability Insurance, a cash program for workers who have become disabled. You have to have a sufficient work history to get it. It also has a definition of disability. Even the VA and the Department of Defense have their own definitions of disability.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  So it's across these definitions, there are still people who will report, I have a work-limiting condition, but I didn't pass the disability test. So a lot of people who are 18 to 64 years old and poor and not working, you're going to have a ton that are on disability, but they don't get enough in benefits to be above the poverty line. And then you'll have a ton who arguably should be on disability, but they don't meet the test. And disability tests don't change that often. One of the conditions that's very hard to get a disability benefit for right now are related to like psychological disorders.

• 24:52Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  And some of the disability test comes down to, could you reasonably get a job doing something else in the economy? Well, they don't update those, what are the other opportunities in the economy? They don't update those regularly.

• 25:04Robin Rauzi?

  Like, what do you, what do you mean? I mean, like...

• 25:06Speaker 02

  In order to be disabled, you both have to have some type of condition and it has to be the case that you can't go out and earn money in the labor market. Well, part of that is they actually have tables of occupations and job, potential jobs that someone with a condition can do. And so they're like, well, I mean, you, your handshake or you can't move your left arm, but you should still be able to do this. And so some of the disability test isn't even, you're not disabled, but comes down to, like, we still think you should...

• 25:28Robin Rauzi?

  You're disabled, but you could still get a job.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  And for the record, they don't get a job. And economists have studied people who were rejected from disability and have found they really, they don't go to work. Like, these are people who can't work, but they don't get disability. There's a lot of them.

• 25:43Robin Rauzi?

  And they're just, they're, they're just now going to be poor.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  And probably now lose their Medicaid because they won't meet the work requirement. I mean, the other thing to keep in mind is that it's not easy. Even if you are a disabled person who can hold down a job, the Americans with Disabilities Act is not ironclad. And it can be very difficult... Even with a condition that allows you to work to hold down a job, we talked about this before. The highest employment rates people with a disability have ever had were coming out of the pandemic when work from home was a much more accessible option. And then as work from home opportunities end and remote work ends, so do the employment opportunities for people with a disability.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  So it's, I don't want to like, you know, I don't want to sleep on the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's an incredible piece of legislation and it's in some ways the envy of other countries. But that doesn't mean we've done it all.

• 26:42Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  So in addition to volatile income and people working bad jobs and low wages at a $7.25 an hour minimum wage, you also have people who are being missed by the social welfare system. But I don't want to make it sound like there's nobody out there who's like, probably doesn't have a disability, but also doesn't have a job. They also exist.

• 27:01Robin Rauzi?

  Sure, but they're not everybody.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  If you close your eyes and think of an adult in poverty, you probably shouldn't think of them. So that's myth two.

• 27:10Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Rolling through them. And that leads us right into myth three, which is that these 20 million working age adults are all living off of government checks. 20 million people, 18 to 64, the working age adults, are they living off the fat of the land? A half million of those are on TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which is welfare. They can only be on TANF if they're in some kind of work program. So like they're in a temporary job or they're in a training program. It's under a half million adult women who get it and the max is five years. And now four million will be on either SSI or SSDI.

• 27:50Robin Rauzi?

  Which is the disability program.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Which is the disability programs. So of this 20 million.

• 27:55Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, so how many are getting government assistance? It's, what was that, four and a half million total?

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So not even one in four are getting cash from the government.

• 28:04Robin Rauzi?

  Of any kind?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  They could be getting unemployment.

• 28:07Robin Rauzi?

  Maybe they're getting unemployment, yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but unemployment has a time limit. It max goes for 26 weeks. And they could be getting general assistance, which is a state administered program. But GA also-

• 28:19Robin Rauzi?

  Which is really low.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Which is really low, goes to very few people, and also doesn't last that long.

• 28:24Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. And it's really hard to get, at least in East here.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  It is really hard to get. You know, for the most part, if you've got 20 million poor adults in the United States, they're not getting cash from the government, for sure. Now, the pushback I get on that is, well, if you're in a free house with free food, do you need, do you need cash? Yeah, well, you do. But also, there are 4 million people in the US who get housing assistance, and 1 million who get childcare assistance.

• 28:52Robin Rauzi?

  Because they're in poverty.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Yes. And both of those programs are not entitlements. So you could be income and situation eligible for housing from the government, and the vast majority of people won't get it.

• 29:02Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Because it's a rationed program.

• 29:05Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. It's very hard to get a housing voucher.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Yes. And people who are on a disability benefit come first. Again, that's not 20 million people who get housing. It's not 20 million people who get free childcare, just like it's not 20 million people who get welfare, and it's not 20 million people who are on disability, right? Like, most of these programs do not even cover a fourth of the population that is poor and are working age adults. Now, the last one is that Medicaid and food stamps, probably the majority of this population does get. But of course, you know, we just passed the single largest cut to Medicaid in the program's history. It's about a trillion dollars that's being shaved off the program. And- You know, the estimates are that somewhere between, well, this is confusing, right?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Because there's people who are targeted to be kicked off of Medicaid by the work requirements. Then there are people who would be failing to enroll in Medicaid because now there are work requirements to the application process. And then the bill separately had cuts to the Affordable Care Act Marketplace Exchange Tax Subsidy. And so in total, about somewhere between 10 and 15 million people will probably become uninsured. But the work requirement is going to hit at least 5 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But if it goes into effect the way that it went into effect in Arkansas, it'll probably be closer to 7 million who are kicked off of Medicaid. So even if you assume all 20 of those million people were on Medicaid, at least seven of them are going to lose it.

• 30:34Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm. So and a lot of these folks are, per your other study, they're disabled but weren't able to qualify for disability.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  That's a lot of them.

• 30:43Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Not all of them.

• 30:45Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  But that's a lot of them. So there is a set of people in the US that would meet the stereotype that is often projected onto poor people, that they are people who have been poor for a very long time, who have never worked. Them getting government assistance is probably the hardest part to believe. I mean, I could believe the first two and say like, yeah, even in like by a generous estimation, there might be 3 million of those people or 5 million of those people. They're not getting much. Like, if they're getting anything, they're getting food stamps, which on average goes like 3 grand a year, so.

• 31:16Robin Rauzi?

  Less than $10 a day or something to try to...

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty low. They've definitely done studies of consumption over the course of food stamps. Food stamps replenish is once a month, and within 1 to 4 days of your food stamps replenishing is when most people will have deep food insecurity and skipped meals and hunger. And then they get the food stamps and then they bounce back.

• 31:39Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  So I, I wanted to set these three things out to be optimistic.

• 31:49Robin Rauzi?

  One of the things that I take away from this conversation is that we could diagnose the problems around poverty a lot better than we do and be more agile about how we meet needs. The combination of state and federal programs, the bureaucracy to it, the time requirements that we're asking for, the lack of updates to the kind of things you were talking about. There's a lot of opportunity for us to help people in need when they need it and shorten then the period of time that they're going to need it.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, you know, this is all about working age adults. You know, what you would get by looking at this group is that our economy is generating poverty and we don't do much to prevent it or address it. We're much more inclined to say like, this is your fault for not having a job and being lazy and growing up where you were told poverty is okay versus like, yeah, we have a really volatile little wage labor market that produces a ton of poverty and income shocks and we've done very little about it. I mean, the whole other separate conversation is like, why don't we care that there are kids who are poor?

• 32:54Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  It's somewhere between 10 and 12 million kids. It's like one in seven. It's a really high number and we know just how deleterious poverty is for a child. Why we don't intervene there, I think, goes back to this question of like, well, we don't want to help parents that we think

• 33:15Robin Rauzi?

  Aren't deserving.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Are late. Yeah, we don't, we don't want to help. I mean, like, y'all, poverty is not that hard to fix. Like, this is the optimistic part. There are two ways to fix poverty. One of them is the Band-Aid.

• 33:25Robin Rauzi?

  Give money.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Give them cash. And if you don't believe me that that could work, look at the poverty rate of elderly people. Give them cash, man, they're not poor. They're might not be thriving. You could have a lot of elderly people tell you that they're not getting by on much, but they're not poor. They're not on the street, they're not destitute, and they all have healthcare. So, we can do a lot when we put our mind to it, but we've decided that old people who have worked are worthy and young children are not.

• 33:49Robin Rauzi?

  Even though there are, there are future worker bots. I mean, like

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Future worker bots. I will say, I, I, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up that

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Ugh, Christ, I don't want to get into this. But the way that we This is like, this is a groan. This is such a groan. The way that we measure poverty in the US is based on cash income. However, much of the support that the federal government provides to people who are in poverty is not cash. So like, food stamps wouldn't count as cash. And so you could get food stamps and still be poor because you don't have any other income. But like, there's this whole other way to measure poverty, which we call the supplemental poverty measure, which takes these things into account. However, it also takes into account things like the taxes you pay, your medical expenses, how much you have to pay to get to your job. And that poverty line is a little bit higher.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Under the supplemental measure, the poverty rate for children is lower.

• 34:46Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, okay. All right. That makes sense.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  But under the supplemental measure, the poverty rate for the elderly is higher.

• 34:51Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Basically, because kids are supported through in-kind benefits and elderly people pay a ton of money for healthcare.

• 34:56Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  But I mean, you know, we're not winning awards. It's not like a zero.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  It's not like, actually, poverty goes away if you look at this measure. Like, come on, no, it's not. It's smaller. I mean, what's, what's really unfortunate about it is that when we said three and a half million kids were removed from poverty during the child tax credit, this measure is the one that's like, it actually did fall. Like, it cratered this poverty rate for children amongst the supplemental measure because of all the things that went out the door in the pandemic, and then it shot back up again.

• 35:25Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  So that is depressing. I'm not going to lie. People who had spent their entire lives researching poverty and trying to come up with the most palatable, non-blue-sky, but actually practical approaches to helping with poverty, they arrived at a pretty good policy, and it worked. And it worked really well. Now, it ended, but that doesn't mean we don't know that it worked. We gave them surveys, asking them where they spent their money. We gave them, like, diaries to say, tell me everything you spent this money on. We tracked their income and measurements over the month. We followed this money so closely, we, as in, people who care about poverty, to come up with a mountain of evidence that basically said, turns out

• 36:05Robin Rauzi?

  If you give

• 36:07Speaker 02

  You give parents of young children, especially, but parents of children money, goes right out the door for food and shelter, which is what most people spend their money on. And then if they spend it on their kids, they spend it on things like educational expenses. So it's not inspiring to walk away from a solution, but it is

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Incredibly optimistic to know that one is within our reach. We don't have to call it the child tax credit. It's basically you give every kid in the US a little bit of cash every month to stabilize their incomes in the face of poverty and volatility and food stamps that aren't enough. And the biggest retort, I mean, the number one objection to this policy is that it's too expensive and it is a fourth of the size of the tax cut we just passed. So we could do this, we could have-

• 36:52Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, you could do this all day long.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could do this four times. I could give every kid in the US tens of thousands of dollars and it would still cost less than this tax bill. So I take a lot of hope in that of both it's incredibly possible. We know we can do a good job and we can make a difference for child poverty. I take a lot of hope from it.

• 37:12Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. I don't want to dash your hope, but you know, you did talk about this group of people that we've made no progress on in 40 years. Are we trying anything? Do we have any ideas?

• 37:22Speaker 02

  So the other thing that keeps people in this group is that they're caretaking. And they're not necessarily caretaking for children. They could be caretaking for a parent-

• 37:30Robin Rauzi?

  Sibling, parents.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Or a sibling. And so like you can't work because you have to take care of someone, but like you aren't earning money and so you don't have enough. It always goes back to the right diagnosis for the problem so that you can find the right solution. And we haven't tried much when it comes to this group. We haven't tried to do, say, like, updates to our disability codes or our disability test. Or let's make sure that behavioral and psychological disorders are covered by the disability test. And in the meantime, while we're doing that with the left hand, let's pursue a really aggressive accommodation policy at work. And let's make sure something like the right to work from home is enshrined in law

• 38:14Speaker 02

  to give people who don't have the ability to get to an office a fair chance. We could do more for disabled people. At the same time, we could do more for caretaking because paid family leave, we think about little babies, but it's mainly adults who are being taken care of under a paid family leave scheme.

• 38:30Robin Rauzi?

  Really?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, if I have paid family medical leave, like they have in California, like they have in Oregon, half the claims will be for myself. Like I'm on paid family medical leave because I am on medical leave. And then of the remaining claims, the biggest claim is for parent, partner, or sibling.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  When you think of like dependents that fall ill, the people are much more likely to list off people who are older than them than younger than them, especially where we are in our demographics right now. So, yeah, I mean, we don't have a great long-term care system. We don't have a short-term care system, so we don't have a great long-term care system. I think that if we approach those problems more head-on, we would make more headway with the population. And then, you know, I think it goes back to, are you trying to fix the person? Or are you trying to fix the thing that's causing people to not be able to earn income? Which would be a terrible labor market, or disability that's not correctly diagnosed or treated or cared for, or a lack of care system in our economy? Like, those, we'll never get to zero, but we could do better.

• 39:33Robin Rauzi?

  Right. Well, and I also think we could do better about people's income volatility. I mean, these people that you're talking about, huge numbers of them, going in and out of poverty over the course of one year or four years. We could do so much to even that out for them. And if we had less of that, frankly, we'd have more bandwidth as a society to deal with these other, maybe more seemingly intractable problems, but that are affecting a smaller portion of the population.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you see people as the cause of poverty or the result of poverty?

• 40:05Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  I mean, if you think of it as a result, you'll get to the cause. If you think the cause is the person, you're not going to be that effective, because we know that that's not the case. We know that because we have hero statisticians at the Census Bureau who are telling us, like, as clearly as possible, that is not the case.

• 40:23Robin Rauzi?

  That's a good way to put it.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Okay, well, if you just said that, I should just stop talking. And that is it.

• 40:31Robin Rauzi?

  Time to stop talking.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, time to stop talking. Okay, so, okay, done. That's poverty. I just want to keep going, and we would love questions on this, I guess is one way to put it. I would love to know what y'all would like to know more about this.

• 40:46Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. Pilot cleanser?

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Pilot cleanser.

• 40:49Robin Rauzi?

  Time for executive orders.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Wait, can you go first?

• 40:53Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, mine's really petty. Mine is, take your trash cans and your recycling in within 24 hours of the actual trash trucks coming. I've had it. People on my street, bring in your trash.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Did any of them listen to the podcast?

• 41:08Robin Rauzi?

  No.

• 41:10Robin Rauzi?

  No, that's so true. My tenant downstairs listens to the podcast. He'll agree with me.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Bring it in your trash.

• 41:15Robin Rauzi?

  He brings in the trash cans. He's great.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  I don't know if mine's gonna be petty. Okay, it's also related to trash, actually, but it's everywhere in the US, recycling and trash has to come once a week. Like, make it some kind of public health order.

• 41:30Robin Rauzi?

  You don't get your recycling every week?

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Not in the low-tax haven.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  We have a separate problem here, which is that our recycling only comes every other week. And it's also like, the city is behind. They don't come on time.

• 41:47Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, and then you just leave it out, yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  So you just leave it out. It's a way, I was driving my kids and doing drop off in the morning, and as we were waiting to like, take a right turn, a recycling truck went by, and my husband are like, "Oh, get out some flags, time to come down this block." And there's something, I don't, I can't speak to what is going on in the city of Houston. It's like been an ongoing problem. But yes, they are always late with recycling. So you would hate it, because there's just, we will have like, four days in a row where you're like, cans are just out waiting for-

• 42:16Robin Rauzi?

  Just bins out on the street all the time.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, not in Robin's world. So I do, I think that you should have, for environmental purposes, I think you should have guaranteed weekly pickup everywhere in the US.

• 42:27Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I like it. I recommend it, except, take your bins in. Take them in. Okay.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  If our executive orders were made into an HOA, we would be vicious, unfriendly neighborhood.

• 42:39Robin Rauzi?

  We'd be terrible.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Just Robin and I walking around with like, a whistle and a megaphone, finding someone with a leaf blower, being like, "No! No!" Spiritual sponsors.

• 42:53Robin Rauzi?

  Yes. So, the TV show Dairy Girls, I don't know if you've seen Dairy Girls?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  I like, memorized it. I love it so much.

• 42:59Robin Rauzi?

  So people had recommended this to me for a long time, and I just never, and I never watched it until we started watching it a few weeks ago. And I, it is really, it is really good. I particularly love Sister George Michael, who steals every scene. She's the woman who runs the Catholic Girls' School in Derry, where the main, all the main characters go to school. If you haven't seen it, it's all set at the very end of the, you know, the period called the troubles of Northern Ireland. And the conflict of the mundane of your daily life and the surreal of living through the tail end of a civil war in that case, and the how the the ordinary just kind of

• 43:41Robin Rauzi?

  keeps going through this extraordinary period of of history. But it's also just really funny. It's really funny. So yeah, so Dairy Girls, if you hadn't seen it, recommend.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  I basically keep like 10 episodes permanently downloaded on my phone. Should I just like find myself in a situation where I would like to like delay? I don't know. I'm like, I'm pulling up, I'm pulling up the concert episode. Oh, man. Okay, this is a great spiritual sponsor. My spiritual sponsor this week is, I don't know her handle, but she's a creator and her name is Coach Jackie. Okay, so this is a creator who runs a feature called Is She Gay? Or Does She X? And it's like, Coach College Basketball, or Play Professional Soccer. Now, this is, okay, so stay with me here. It doesn't sound good.

• 44:31Robin Rauzi?

  It's really funny.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  That she takes photos of women who are in some type of professional athletic settings, and then goes through each item of the wardrobe that they're wearing to say whether or not it's straight or gay. And at the end, you have to guess, and she does the reveal of whether or not they're straight or gay. It's, it's so funny. I don't know why I find it so delightful, but like

• 44:51Robin Rauzi?

  Because she's really charming, you know?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Oh, she's super charming. The lines are great. She'll have throwaway lines that are, like, the timing is incredible of like, well, I know I said that messy buns are straight, but this one's messy enough, it's gone all the way back to gay. Like, it's so good. The whole thing is really uplifting and heartwarming. And

• 45:11Robin Rauzi?

  It's pretty charming.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  It's, it's great. It's great. But I was trying to probe my thoughts of like, why do I like this so much of these like, two-minute videos assessing the wardrobe of professional athletes about gay or straight, as I'm giggling like hell. And I, I think it's because, one, she's like clearly so full of admiration.

• 45:29Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  But I also think it's, it goes back to something I really just love about professional women's sports, is that it is, it is a remarkably gay, straight place. And there aren't that many places in the US that I can think of where there's like sexual orientation parody.

• 45:47Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Or you have like a really, you put up strong numbers on both fronts. I mean, other than our show, which is also sexual orientation, perfect, perfect parody.

• 45:58Robin Rauzi?

  Total parody.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  On sexual orientation. I think I just like the idea of how much women's sports is a place where there are gay and straight people.

• 46:06Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  You know, together and what that says about women's sports. And so the fact that it would be like so, such an obvious and accepted thing that you could circle back around to these types of videos, I think that might be why I find it so funny, in addition to her incredible comedic timing.

• 46:21Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, but also her, her assessment of what's gay and what's straight is particularly funny. Um, is it always accurate? I don't know if it matters, but you know, it's where you hold your hands, what earrings you're wearing, what, what's the collar on your shirt? Like frankly, v-neck, very gay, you know?

• 46:38Speaker 02

  No, yeah, like the, the top is gay, the pants are straight, the heels are obviously gay, the heels are obviously straight, but the way she's holding her hands, that's the gayest thing I've ever seen.

• 46:47Robin Rauzi?

  But the ponytail, you know, it's, yeah, okay, just take our, just take our word for it, it's funny.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, take our, take our, take our word for it, that Robin and I's DMs is half these videos.

• 46:58Robin Rauzi?

  Seriously, seriously.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  So, thank you very much to the people that have kept us laughing. Sister George Michael, Dairy Girls, and Coach Jackie.

• 47:06Robin Rauzi?

  Totally.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  And the ever, ever, ever-present question of is she gay or is she straight?

• 47:10Robin Rauzi?

  We actually also had a financial sponsor who came in at kind of the, you know, spiritual sponsor plus level, who's anonymous, but wanted to shout out his mother-in-law, Cindy Durche in Driggs, Idaho, who is a forensic accounting professor and who also apparently listens to our show, which is amazing. And, um, just want to say thanks a lot, it really is wind under our wings.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. Okay, we end our show by snapping out our producers, Andy and Sophie.

• 47:46Robin Rauzi?

  We're gonna be so pleased that it's not even two hours of recording.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's up to... That was only one bathroom break.

• 47:54Robin Rauzi?

  Amazing.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  New record.