Working-class poverty means never being able to pay all the bills. You rob Peter to pay Paul. You pay the electric bill this month, the water bill next month. You agree to pay the dentist $20 a month forever. The cost of everything goes up: food, utilities, rent, healthcare. Your income stays the same.

Things get shabby. You keep fixing your old car because newer used cars are too expensive. Anyone can look at your clothes and know you have no money. When you interview for a new job, you try not to let your desperation show.

You learn to say no to your kids. No to ice cream on hot days. No to birthday parties so you won’t have to buy presents. No to karate lessons, soccer lessons, music lessons. No to the sneakers all the other kids wear.

You lie awake at night worrying about money. You are always anxious, and your frustration affects your relationships. It’s hard not to take things out on your partner or your children. You have no energy for your friends or for taking care of yourself. The stress is nonstop.

You’re ashamed of yourself. You wonder where you went wrong. You blame yourself for your financial problems. America is supposed to be a land of opportunity, so if you’re poor, you figure it must be your own fault — maybe you have a bad attitude, or maybe you’re just stupid.

But poor people, in my experience, are exactly like rich people, except they have no money. Poor people often work incredibly hard and use tremendous ingenuity to stretch what money they have, especially if there are kids to feed. We need to stop blaming poverty on the poor.

Most people are poor because they were born into poor families. Capitalism only works if you have capital. If you have capital – that is, money – you can invest in an education, a business, the stock market or real estate, and make more money. If you don’t have money, all you can do is look for the best job you can get. Without a good education or even a good suit of clothes, you are not likely to find the kind of job that lifts you out of poverty.

The real cause of working-class poverty is a system that allows companies to pay workers less than a living wage. Instead of giving people a chance to save money toward a better future, low-wage jobs make people struggle just to live day to day. The minimum wage that is supposed to provide an income floor remains far below what people actually need to survive.

The American myth is that if we work hard and play by the rules, we will make more money as time goes by. This has not actually been true since the 1970s. In the past four decades, most income growth has gone to the top ten percent. In the ten years since the last recession, nearly all the growth has gone to the top one percent. Poverty is a social problem, not a psychological problem. Our economic system is designed to keep the rich on top, and the poor trapped where they are.

Unions used to be our best means of leveling the playing field. Both government and corporations have deliberately undermined them, making it difficult or impossible to organize workers and punishing activists for trying. Now most of us are on our own, playing on a field that keeps tilting so all the money slides to the rich.

America has been crueler and crueler to poor people since Reagan brought in the “greed is good” era in the 1980s. The safety net is in tatters. The next federal budget is only going to make a bad situation worse.

Fortunately, in spite of the current administration, America is still a democracy. If we decide to change this situation, we can.

If we vote, and pick the right people to represent us, we can increase the earned income tax credit and the minimum wage. We can raise taxes on the rich to fund the programs we all might need some day, since one accident or illness, job loss or divorce could make any of us hit the bottom.

We can make it easier to form unions and harder for companies to retaliate against organizers. We can establish a guaranteed minimum income in case robots take our jobs. We can put less public money into the war machine and more into subsidized childcare, healthcare and housing. We can forgive student debt and make public colleges free.

What we can’t do is continue to ignore poverty as though it’s someone else’s problem. Today, we might be helping someone else. Tomorrow, they might have to help us.

- Jane Collins writes her column for the Medford Transcript.