Thread by @rebeccavallas

Move over, climate change.

Trump’s White House just issued a sweeping denial of poverty in America.

(THREAD.)

1. In a report released late last week, Trump’s WH declared the War on Poverty “largely over and a success.” The report is literally page after page of gaslighting the very real hardship faced by tens of millions of Americans struggling to afford food, housing, healthcare & more.

2. The WH report brazenly denies that homelessness is a meaningful problem in the U.S.—erasing the plight of the over *half a million* Americans without shelter on any given night (which includes 58,000 families with children).

3. It tells the 40+ million Americans who struggle with hunger to quit their complaining because “difficulty in obtaining food” and “reduced diet quality as a consequence of limited resources” aren’t *really* hunger.

4. The WH report even brags that—in 2018, in the richest nation on earth—“almost all Americans have access to clean water.”

(Sorry, people of Flint; Trump’s White House doesn’t think you even merit a footnote.)

5. To add the appearance of intellectual rigor to its gaslighting, the report includes a series of fancy-looking graphs purporting to show that poverty in America has reached historic lows.

(Warning: I’m gonna get wonky for a sec here, but bear with me, it’s for good reason...)

6. In keeping with its penchant for spewing “alternative facts,” the White House cherry-picks an alternative measure of poverty based on consumption. In short, instead of looking at how much resources people have, this type of measure looks at their spending.

7. But the WH’s alternative measure is wildly out of step with basically every other indicator of poverty available—from the official poverty measure to the “supplemental poverty measure” (which counts assistance from antipoverty programs) to food insecurity.

8. The WH’s alternative measure is also wildly out of step with pretty much every other indicator of hardship—from falling behind on rent/mortgage to trouble paying utility bills to unmet medical needs due to cost, and more.

9. In fact, the measure the WH cherrypicked to deny poverty is so epically bad at assessing poverty & hardship, if we used it “we would be forced to conclude that conditions were markedly better at the height of the Great Recession than in the year 2000," as @profshaefer notes.

10. Why is this particular measure so out of step with actual poverty trends? Among many reasons, it doesn’t distinguish whether people are spending $$ they actually have vs. taking on debt to survive -- or consider if people are spending 60, 70% of their income on rent, etc.

11. All of this makes it the perfect poverty-denial measure.

And it’s this poverty-denial measure—contradicted by essentially every other available measure of poverty & hardship—that Trump’s White House is using to declare the War on Poverty “largely over and a success.”

**Folks who want to wonk out more on the limitations of consumption-based measures of poverty like the one the WH cherrypicked for this report should check out @profshaefer & colleagues’ helpful explainer: poverty.umich.edu/wp-content/upl… (which includes the above graphs)

@profshaefer 12. Meanwhile, in reality:

✔️Nearly half of U.S. households are struggling to afford basics like food, housing & health care

✔️4 in 10 Americans don’t have even $400 in the bank

✔️5.3 million Americans are living in "Third World conditions of poverty" per the U.N.

@profshaefer 13. As with climate change, the reason Trump wants to deny the existence of poverty in the U.S. is to justify a radical, ideological agenda. In this case, his quest to take food, housing, and health care away from tens of millions of Americans—to pay for his millionaire tax cuts.

@profshaefer 14. But there’s another cynical layer to this—and that’s Trump’s continued efforts to 1) smear popular programs like Medicaid and SNAP with the dog-whistle of “welfare” & 2) frame cuts in the language of work (both of which the WH report do in spades).

@profshaefer 15. A big part of why we’re seeing Trump take this approach—it’s HIS OWN VOTERS who stand to be hurt the most by his proposed cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, nutrition assistance, housing assistance, and other programs that help families get by.

@profshaefer 16. In fact, polling earlier this year by @amprog found that **61% of Trump’s voters** faced significant economic hardship in just the past year (trouble finding a job that pays enough, affording their rent/mortgage, affording needed medical care, etc.) cdn.americanprogress.org/content/upload…

@profshaefer @amprog 17. By dressing up his cuts in the makers/takers frame & calling everything he’s trying to cut “welfare,” Trump’s simultaneously hoping his voters don’t notice they’re getting screwed by the guy they elected—while throwing red meat to his base in the form of a racial dog-whistle.

@profshaefer @amprog 18. This is why Trump is disguising his cuts as so-called “work requirements”—which is code for taking food, housing & health care away from unemployed & underemployed workers (and a policy that has nothing to do with helping anyone work). americanprogress.org/issues/poverty…

@profshaefer @amprog 19. BONUS: Blaming struggling workers for “not working hard enough” is a handy smokescreen to distract from the GOP’s inaction on the real problems they face: poverty-level wages; lack of affordable childcare, paid leave & sick days; a nationwide affordable housing crisis, etc.

@profshaefer @amprog 20. The WH report is right about one thing: As long as Trump and his GOP colleagues are in power, the War on Poverty is definitely over. It’s been replaced with a war on the working class—including many of the very same people who voted Trump into office in the first place.
/end