The reliance on stereotypes is in part the result of a structural problem within the media. Most newspapers have a business beat, with a number of highly trained journalists who know how to cover companies, trading, the markets and so on. But almost none have labor reporters anymore, and to my knowledge, none have full-time poverty-beat correspondents. And all of this helps to render invisible the lives and the life stories of tens of millions of Americans.
Sasha AbramskyDespite all of the civil rights gains of the past several decades, when it comes to economic opportunity, African Americans and Latinos still experience far more unemployment than do whites and Asians, average wages are lower, and household wealth is lower. A smaller percentage of African Americans and Latinos attend, and complete, college, than is the case with whites and Asians, and a higher percentage end up in prison. All of these are indicators of massive disparities in opportunity, and these disparities are mirrored in poverty data.
Sasha AbramskyI argue that in the long run, the US would be on a far more financially secure footing if we recalibrate how we spend about two-to-three percent of the country's GNP, using state and federal taxes to create pools of money for spending on America's poor - which would, as numerous economists have argued in recent years, create virtuous spending circles, since those on lower incomes spend more of each extra dollar in their possession than do those on higher incomes.
Sasha AbramskyThe reliance on stereotypes is in part the result of a structural problem within the media. Most newspapers have a business beat, with a number of highly trained journalists who know how to cover companies, trading, the markets and so on. But almost none have labor reporters anymore, and to my knowledge, none have full-time poverty-beat correspondents. And all of this helps to render invisible the lives and the life stories of tens of millions of Americans.
Sasha AbramskyToo often the media assumes that "poverty" is an African American or a Latino issue. Of course, that's nonsense. While a higher percentage of the African American and Latino population does live in poverty as compared to the white population, when overall numbers are looked at, it is clear that people of all races, ethnicities, and colors, are represented amongst America's poor.
Sasha AbramskyThe failure of the first Barack Obama administration to really deliver on a new War on Poverty and a new language to explain these societal challenges in some ways provided the fuel that led to the Occupy Movement a few years later. And, while Occupy was a somewhat transitory phenomenon, many of the activist groups that emerged during this period are still out there, and still working on reshaping the political debate around taxes, around welfare, around government assistance to the poor, around debt relief for students, and so on.
Sasha Abramsky