The United States has a poverty problem.…

Most Americans — liberals and conservatives alike — now believe people are poor because “they have faced more obstacles in life,” not because of a moral failing. Long overdue, however, is a reckoning with the fact that many of us help to create and uphold those obstacles through the collective moral failing of enriching ourselves by impoverishing others. Poverty isn’t just a failure of public policy. It’s a failure of public virtue.

To break this cycle, we must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists.

— Matthew Desmond, “America Is in a Disgraced Class of Its Own,” The New York Times