When you see a kid selling these on the subway, it’s a sign of a national social safety net on the skids.

This past weekend, sitting once again in my subway car on my way to somewhere, a boy of about 12 — he later confirmed this — got on. He had a big box of candy in his hands and announced that he was selling candy.

Fruit chews, two packs for $1.

We were on the C train in Brooklyn.

New York City, even more than many other places in America, is hyper-focused on denouncing economic disparity and we claim we want it to stop; people here criticize other states where we think those people don’t care about social issues and kids. But in NYC, there are a lot of instances where we see evident disparity and the hardship of children in particular, and no one does anything about it. Like when kids are working without labor protections in dangerous places, unsupervised. Like selling stuff on subway trains.

Apart from going in to get from one side of town to the other, a subway is not someplace children should be spending hours, much less asking total strangers for income, thus putting their own lives in danger if they happen upon someone who will do them harm.

For example, this middleschool student. Shouldn’t he be a) playing b) spending time with family c) studying or learning something d) helping his parents with chores and getting the chance to grumble about it (I still remember being this age)? Instead, he is selling candy on a subway train. He looked upset about it. I guess he is wondering why life is like this, so hard, when he sees money all around him. So am I.

A society where children have to work is a society where disparity and poverty are raging.

His family doesn’t have enough income and they live in a city that is unrelentingly expensive. It is also a city that is unforgiving when it comes to people needing help. We regularly spend $3,000+ a month here to house a homeless family in utter scarcity in a shelter instead of giving them enough income support to rent a real apartment at half that amount. That is obviously not a decision driven by logic and sensible economics, but by the retrograde idea that punishing people for being poor is the most important part of social policy. It shows the policymakers don’t care that the lives of children are forever scarred by this approach.

Although the current Mayor of New York City fashioned his campaign on the idea that a city full of wealth disparity was just plain wrong, he takes little action to halt the growing destitution around us. We see a lot of money spent, but not for income support for destitute people. Instead, the poorer New Yorkers become, the more public money is given to institutions to provide “services” to poor students, poor families, homeless families, and etc. These services include lots of non-cash stuff like a bed in a shelter, a “work assignment,” mental health sessions with social workers, the famous annual back to school backpack distributions, and so on, but no income. This approach is a colonial era approach to poverty, grounded in the fundamental idea that poor people are reckless and stupid. This approach deepens the very problems we claim to want to solve, because it withholds the one thing that solves poverty. That is money.

Our resistance to giving the one thing that would work is retrograde and devoid of logic. Given this state of resistance to distributing income, the promise to end our “tale of two cities” in NYC rings false. A re-commitment to ending poverty is needed now — one that includes a definitive commitment to handing resources of value to New Yorkers, instead of making money off of them and their children by forcing them to accept “services” they may not need, while refusing to supply them any money with which to meet their survival needs themselves.

While the Office of the Mayor webpage says, “As New York City’s 109th mayor, Bill de Blasio is committed to fighting the income inequality that has created a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ across the five boroughs,” all I see is more desperate people on the street, larger numbers of homeless people recorded as being in shelters. And more kids selling candy on trains. The mayor who said he wanted to be mayor again is nowhere to be found. While 13 year olds struggle to earn a few cents and homelessness grows, he’s travelling about the country thinking about his next career move.

We have a society where children have to sell candy on trains out of economic need, and where we all tolerate the removal of income support that has led to it. The United States has been dismantling income support within its safety net programs for decades. It started in the 70s but there was lots of outcry and push back. It progressed a lot in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, fueled by his lies about having seen people going to the welfare office in Cadillacs and etc. But the assault against income maintenance for Americans picked up the most speed under the Presidency of Bill “End Welfare as We Know It” Clinton, a legacy I hope he regrets. Because of his 1996 legislation, fewer families than ever get any cash assistance, an entire generation grew up without their parents as poor mothers were forced to work for low pay or no pay — whether they had safe child care or not. Clinton more than anyone is directly responsible for kids having to sell candy on subway trains while he lives in comfort in the best part of Westchester. When Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the Presidency, she ignored the victims of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform as much as she ignored the poor of Appalachia.

And, furthermore, the middle school kid who sold me my candy this weekend was black. I have seen many dozens of kids selling candy on the trains in the past five years or so. None have been white kids. Not one. Is it lost on anyone that in a city where the mayor wants to stamp out inequality, that all the kids you see selling candy on the train are black, while only a handful (seven) of the kids who got into Stuyvesant High School this year were black? This is bad, it’s really, really bad.

I don’t want any kid to be going without, having to earn a few cents on a train when he should be busy being a child. The atmosphere of a train filled with grumpy stressed adults is not conducive to anyone’s health, much less the health of a child. We’re talking physical health — the toll of subway air, hours of exposure to germs — as well as mental health — a subway train is not a place for robust social interaction with happy people. That is probably why the Mayor doesn’t travel on it….

Can we face how uncomfortable and sad we feel when a kid walks into our subway car selling candy? One does not feel joy. One feels embarrassment and guilt, because we know that there is something wrong with a city when children have to go to work. Kids only do this in really poor places and during economic crashes: kids sell cigarettes in the town square in a small town in Morocco; American kids sold apples during the Depression. This jarred the public conscience 100 years ago, and was part of the outcry that led to the income maintenance programs under the Social Security Act. The programs contained within it have been tinkered with endlessly so that now they help fewer and fewer people. But child labor was unconscionable in 1919 and it should be in 2019. We should be revolted by it; instead, our fire of revulsion at injustice is waning.

Shall we just keep on averting our eyes when they enter our subway car, maybe buying a pack or two of candy to lessen our own sense of guilt? Or can we do something more? If we can, what is that thing we can do?

For one, we can build housing instead of shelters. What does that have to do with child poverty? Everything. Every dollar the city invests in the shelter approach to ending homelessness is a dollar wasted. We have known since the era of the 1980s that shelters only perpetuate homelessness and traps children and parents in a life of instability and stress. Since the mayor is unaware that the shelter approach is a documented failure, you could write a letter to the editor to inform him, or call into his weekly radio appearance on Brian Lehrer.

Number two, we could insist that New York state (and other states) stop keeping tens of millions of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families dollars unspent at the end of each year, instead of enrolling poor families so their kids don’t have to sell candy on subway trains. Nationally in 2017 alone, state welfare program administrators kept over $3 billion unspent, even though we have at least 40 million Americans living in poverty, and many millions more cannot afford an unexpected $500 bill. These federal welfare funds are supposed to be spent to meet the basic survival needs of poor Americans, including and especially giving them cash income to survive. It is unconscionable to hoard them, but virtually every state is doing so. Including New York. New York state kept $519 million of its Temporary Assistance for Needy Families federal welfare block grant unspent in 2017. Perhaps from their perches away from poor people, the welfare administrators can’t see all the people in need, so they hang onto the money. We have families right here who need help from those unspent federal funds. We need a rational alternative to this method because the way the program is set up, there is almost zero requirement for a state welfare program to act responsibly and morally to meet the basic survival needs of its poorest residents. In the 1980s, 68 percent of poor Americans eligible for this welfare program got income assistance. Today, with the years of diversion and re-design to the detriment of actual people, only 23 percent of eligible low income people do. When I have had occasion to ask a local director in other states why their caseloads are so low, incredibly, they blame — poor people. “We have lots of different services for them, to help them, but they don’t enroll. We are trying everything,” one state welfare director told me in January. Everything except raise her monthly welfare benefit to a family — in her state, it is $240 a month. That is 12 percent of a poverty line income.

Three, a rational alternative is something like a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for the entire country. There is abundant research that shows a Universal Basic Income is a superior method for eliminating poverty. We know that no social service program, no matter how creative, can work absent actual income support for the participants. If you want to see evidence that a UBI is effective, look at what is being reported on the Ontario UBI pilot, which was cancelled by a clueless politician precisely because it was working. You can look at the SIME/DIME experiments of decades past. This is an idea that works. We have to push it ourselves, in the interest of our kids especially, because apparently there are many many people who think it is just fine to hoard welfare funds — meant to be spent on actual people — while middle schoolers peddle candy on subway trains. Maybe that is because these bureaucrats don’t want poor smart kids to compete for seats in Stuyvesant High School. Better to keep those poor smart kids busy peddling candy while rich smart kids get to study.

At present, the one 2020 candidate to date who includes a Universal Basic Income in his campaign platform is Andrew Yang (he calls it a Freedom Dividend), which makes him the only candidate with a plan to really help the middle schooler who sold me my Fruit Snacks. Nothing ends a lack of money but the provision of money. All the services your city comes up with to spend money on do not improve the lives of children and families. If it did, the kid I met would be doing something else on a Saturday, kid things. Like your kids do.