I'm reading Poverty by America, a book by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond on the systematic factors that undergird the persistence of poverty in America. I'm not going to summarize everything--some of his economic assertions are a bit optimistic, but he has important observations. In particular:
1) Payday lenders and check-cashing places really do exploit the poor. I'm not convinced that getting more reputable bank to serve low-income/high-risk customers is as easy as he thinks, but by god it is a task worth working on. There must be some regulatory changes that could help here.
2) The money that inmates have to spend on phone calls is insane. It's just one of the many ways that literally captive customers are milked when they can least afford it. Obviously it's not the worst thing done to inmates, but it's a proxy for a bunch of things, and I suspect that an attack on the vested interests around exploitation of prisoners would raise similar issues whether the topic was phone calls or something else.
3) The decline of unions has had utterly predictable consequences for inequality in America.
4) Zoning that favors single-family dwellings is a huge cause of soaring costs of living.
5) America's tax code is full of social engineering, and the vast majority of it is for the benefit of the upper-middle class and above. I'm not optimistic that America would tolerate wholesale abandonment of tax breaks without corresponding across-the-board cuts, but even a more-or-less revenue-neutral change that removed these thumbs on scales would release a lot of economic pressures, and unskew a whole bunch of things. And if the change were even mildly revenue-positive, it would definitely improve the fiscal situation.
