Jonah Shepp is a writer and editor who lives in New York. His work has appeared at Politico Magazine, New York Magazine, Slate, the Dish, and the Jordan Times.

This Saturday, six Republican presidential candidates will gather alongside House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. Tim Scott at a conference on poverty. Organized by three domestic policy think tanks, the Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity bills itself as a platform for them to “discuss their ideas for fighting poverty and expanding opportunity in America.”

For a party not exactly known for its sympathy toward the less fortunate, that the GOP is talking about them in the first place seems like a sign of progress. With 46 million Americans living in poverty today, both parties—not just liberal Democrats—ought to be taking this issue seriously. And yet, as someone who grew up among the American poor and has listened to politicians talk about how to solve the problem of people like me for decades, I fear we won’t hear much of anything new. In my experience, most of those who claim to know the solution to American poverty have no idea what poverty really means to those who have lived in it.


If you met me, you wouldn’t think I grew up in a desperately poor home. As a white, Jewish native of Manhattan with a degree from an elite college and a white-collar career, I often surprise people when I tell them that I remember what food stamps looked like when they were actual paper coupons. People from my class background don’t usually make it into the ranks of educated professionals, and I don’t fit the stereotype of what a poor person looks or sounds like. Today, I am no longer poor—or at least, not nearly as poor as I used to be—and I count myself fortunate to have escaped the trap of intergenerational poverty with the ability and opportunity to tell my tale.

I grew up in Manhattan’s East Village during the late 1980s and the 1990s with a single mother who struggled her entire life with depression, addiction and the unresolved consequences of growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional household. My mother had always expected to get married and have a husband to provide for her, but that didn’t work out as planned, while she herself had a hard time holding down a job and was hopeless with money. Throughout my childhood, our income consisted of the public assistance she received on my behalf—my father was not forthcoming with child support—and what little she made on the side working off the books as a massage therapist. The gaps that remained she filled by “borrowing” from her sister and an ever-dwindling selection of friends. I never went hungry or lost my home, but our living situation was always fairly precarious. I was more familiar with New York’s social service system and housing court by the age of 10 than most adults who live in the city.

Yes, in the end, I managed to claw my way out of poverty and into some semblance of stability. That took a lot of work on my part, but it also depended greatly on the kindness of others, and something politicians don’t like to talk about: pure dumb luck.

That’s why, when people praise me for getting out of poverty, I don’t really accept the compliment. Implicit in that praise is the notion that it was all up to me—that I “pulled myself up,” and that if I had failed to improve my lot, I would somehow be at fault—that it would be a consequence of my life choices. That’s precisely the sort of high-minded scolding we can expect to hear from the food-stamp-cutting millionaires at the Kemp Forum.

This misapprehension of poverty is made all the more insidious by our political class’ infatuation with it. Donald Trump, currently leading the Republican presidential field, thinks that the way to get 50 million Americans “off” poverty (that’s how Sean Hannity put it, as though poverty were some kind of drug) is to create vaguely stated incentives to work—and take away the “disincentives” of public assistance. Democrats, meanwhile, are terrified of being portrayed as defenders of the moocher class. Their leading candidate, Hillary Clinton, has a view of poor people virtually identical to those of her GOP opponents. She supported her husband’s disastrous gutting of welfare in the ‘90s and consistently defended it by insulting poor people as deadbeats and dependents. When Bernie Sanders—the only candidate who seems to grasp that poor people can still have dignity—tries to talk about poverty, the media quibble with his citations and call him a liar. No wonder most Democrats prefer to talk about the middle class.

There’s no denying that poor people make bad choices all the time. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter much because we don’t actually have that many choices to make, economic or otherwise. This, more than anything else, is what our moralizing politicos fail to understand about American poverty: how often we get stuck in situations where we have no options.

One time in college, I was home for the holidays when I got sick enough that I had to go to the doctor (when you’re poor and uninsured, of course, that threshold is pretty high). Because I was going to school in Massachusetts, I was required to have health insurance there, but the bare-bones insurance the college provided for me as part of my scholarship was useless out of state, and paying for a medical visit wasn’t in my budget.

My family doctor’s office doesn’t turn patients away, so I was able to get help for free, but I had to sit with a social worker, explain why I couldn’t pay and answer a number of completely irrelevant and very personal questions about my mental health, sexual history and drug use. It’s condescending and intrusive, and if you’re not poor, this kind of thing doesn’t happen to you. Having grown up in the welfare system, I was familiar with such petty indignities. It might sound like no big deal in isolation—who wouldn’t answer a few questions in exchange for a doctor’s visit?—but the accumulation of them sends a constant message that as a poor person, your time, your privacy and your feelings are less valuable than those of other people. If I’d had the money, I would have paid it simply to be treated as respectfully as everyone else in that office.

One corollary to poor people having few if any good choices is our expectation that whatever we do, we will be criticized for it. When poverty itself is viewed as a moral failing, it doesn’t make any difference how you handle it. If a single mom chooses to work only part-time and accept state benefits so she can spend more time at home with her child (as my mother did), she’s a lazy welfare cheat; if she leaves the kid home alone in the evening to work that extra shift, she’s a negligent parent.

Buy a steak with your SNAP benefits and you’re profligate; buy cheap junk food instead and your obesity is a burden on the healthcare system—never mind whether or not you have access to healthy, reasonably priced food that you have the time and means to prepare. And of course, if you dare to spend even one dollar of your benefit check on a “luxury item,” you’re a thief; if, instead, you manage to save that dollar, you must not have needed it in the first place. What’s the point in trying to prove yourself worthy of that welfare check when so many of your fellow citizens have prejudged you otherwise?

Having your circumstances make decisions for you time and time again also reinforces the notion that you are powerless over them. In my teen years, my mother’s income consisted mainly of a disability check, of which almost half went to cigarettes, so she relied on the welfare benefits she received on my behalf to keep her own head above water. When I reached legal adulthood and those benefits ran out, she couldn’t pay her rent. I offered to take time off from college, come home and get a job, but she insisted that I stay in school, assuring me that she would work it out somehow.

I knew that wasn’t likely, but I feared that, if I left school, I’d never make it back. Was I to risk dropping out of college and screwing my earnings potential for life, or risk letting my mother lose our home? I’m still not sure I made the better choice.

The summer before my senior year, everything fell apart. Home from school, I awoke one morning to my mother informing me that we had to go to housing court that day, where it became clear that we would be evicted if mom didn’t pony up what she owed the landlords. It was the most terrifying day of my life. I ended up cashing in the few thousand dollars in bonds I had received from some relatives at my bar mitzvah (lucky I had them) to cover her arrears and she managed to work out an arrangement that kept her in her home. I didn’t speak to her for a while after that.

At the time, some people told me I was doing the wrong thing, that I should let my mother face the consequences of her bad choices rather than clearing out my savings to keep her afloat a few more years until the next catastrophe befell her and she needed more help (indeed, my mother nearly lost the apartment again later that year and continued to rely on me financially to varying extents for the rest of her life). But my only other option was to leave my mother at the mercy of the system and her own devices, which I feared were not sufficient for her to overcome the tragedy of losing her home; that wasn’t something I could live with myself having done. I took the bad alternative of losing all my savings over the completely horrible one of watching my own mother forced to live in a shelter.

This is an example of the kind of “choice” poor people have to make all the time.

***

If you’re reading this and thinking that most poor people don’t have a few thousand dollars in bar mitzvah checks, you’re right. I had privileges, advantages and opportunities that most poor Americans can’t even fathom, and that’s partly why I could make it out of that world. Not all my relatives were poor. I had the good fortune to be born white, male and able-bodied, in a relatively safe neighborhood that only became more so as it gentrified during my childhood—and New York’s rent stabilization laws, whatever their faults, allowed my mother and me to stay there.

Throughout my youth, my only encounter with the police was a gentle finger-wag for setting off firecrackers in Chinatown. Nobody pushed drugs on me when I was young, and I have never encountered a gun, much less had one pointed in my direction. When my broke, depressed, alcoholic single mother couldn’t take care of me or fell short, I had family and friends to turn to for help.

Though my upbringing was far from idyllic, my mother taught me to read while I was in diapers, put me in a progressive Jewish nursery school she could hardly afford and was savvy enough to get me a shot at admission into one of New York’s magnet schools in kindergarten. Luckily, I passed the test and thereby was granted free, quality schooling for the next 13 years. Had I failed, or had my mom not known about the magnet system at all, I could have ended up in the same local public school where my neighbor down the street was bullied so badly that it permanently damaged his mental health.

I subsequently managed to get into college and was fortunate enough to matriculate when college endowments were flush and my school was handing out scholarships like candy, so I got a full ride on account of my need. Unlike many of my classmates, I graduated with no debt.

Even with all these advantages, my childhood was painful, traumatic and scary, and getting out of poverty has been an intense struggle for me. But imagine how much harder it would have been if just one of my lucky breaks had gone the other way. What if I had been born black instead of white, or in the South Bronx instead of the East Village; if I hadn’t passed that magnet school entrance exam or gotten that free ride to college; if I hadn’t had an aunt a block away with whom I could stay when mom was on a bender, or a godmother who could buy me things I needed that my family couldn’t afford? I beat the odds, but of course, most kids who grow up in poverty don’t, because they didn’t get half the opportunities I did.

Notice, by the way, that few if any of my advantages involved money. My mother’s income rarely exceeded $1,000 a month, and by the income-based definition, we were always decidedly poor. By itself, however, income is not a great measure of poverty. As we now know, many Americans slip in and out of poverty; their incomes may drop below the poverty line one year only to rise above it the next. My mother and I never rose above it, but thanks to my less tangible privileges (family, education, tenant protections, etc.), I was allowed to suffer a bit less than other poor children and escape the deepest indignities of extreme poverty.

Some economists would prefer that we measure poverty by consumption rather than income, but the way I see it, the truest gauge is insecurity: whether of employment, housing, food, healthcare or other basic needs. Not all those who are broke are poor; if you have a house, assets, resources and friends, you can run out of money and it doesn’t ruin your life. On the other hand, those who can’t pay their rent or feed their kids definitely are. What matters in the end is whether you can afford to pay for your basic needs, and that depends on much more than just your income. In that way, this metric also helps make sense of what “temporary” poverty looks like: If you can pay your rent 11 months out of the year but not 12, that one month of worrying whether your landlord is going to evict you is your little slice of American poverty.

For those who have never experienced real poverty, it’s easy to imagine that the person who can’t afford his rent should simply find a cheaper place to live. But that assumes a lot: Can this person put together enough money to cover a deposit and moving costs? Is cheaper housing even available in his area? Would moving into that cheaper apartment cause him to incur additional expenses, such as transportation costs or more expensive groceries? Would his kids lose out on decent schools, healthy food or safe places to play?

If you don’t know all of that and more, you have no business telling that person what the “right” choice is. Lecturing people with no disposable income on how better to dispose of their income is a perfectly useless exercise. That’s why it’s so maddening when politicians scold the poor for their bad economic choices.

Nobody enjoys spending other people’s money. When Scott Walker calls the safety net “a hammock,” not only is he deliberately insulting the millions of Americans who depend on it to stay afloat during hard times, he is also implying that we somehow enjoy it, which is simply not true. Being on public benefits is an experience in shame and humiliation. The poor are constantly at the mercy of misguided, empathy-resistant politicians looking to “fix” these systems by making them more exclusionary, restrictive and hostile toward those they serve, even though a growing body of evidence suggests that this is the opposite of a solution.

Trump, Walker, Clinton and other public assistance critics ought to know that the “entitlements” and “dependency” they decry are the only thing keeping millions of Americans out of poverty. Instead, they claim that the only thing keeping millions of Americans on the government dole is our willingness to accept it. Even though most Americans think there’s no shame in accepting public assistance, and even though the security that assistance provides can even encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking, the Republican Party remains committed to its mythology that if only poor people didn’t have it so easy, we wouldn’t have it so hard.

Well, they’re right about one thing: The current suite of assistance programs is indeed a mess, but it’s not because our welfare state is too generous. It’s no secret that the SNAP program is an expensive subsidy to the food industry that leaves recipients vulnerable to predatory cash-for-food-stamp scams just to buy light bulbs or toilet paper. A direct cash benefit would be much cheaper to administer and could reduce fraud and waste to boot, but making that switch would require our political leaders to admit that poor people can actually be trusted to spend real money responsibly. So instead we get new restrictions on what kinds of food we are allowed to buy with our EBT cards. Policies like drug testing welfare recipients might sound tough and smart, but in effect, they are hateful, discriminatory and ultimately counterproductive.

This may be wishful thinking on my part, but I can’t help but wonder how different our national conversation about poverty would sound if we talked about it primarily in terms of its human consequences rather than its economic genesis. Whereas anti-poverty policies typically focus on raising incomes to help families avoid poverty or get out of it, what if we also spared a thought for mitigating the trauma of those—especially children—who have no means of escape? Perhaps then we might look at the poor with empathy rather than moral superiority and recognize that their problems may have roots too deep for them to dig up themselves. If we acknowledge that people who can’t meet their needs today also can’t make good choices for tomorrow, we can focus our anti-poverty efforts on solving that core problem of insecurity, rather than expecting the poor to do all the work on their own and clicking our tongues at their predictable, all too preventable failures.