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Welcome to the first issue of Within Our Means, a biweekly newsletter about ending poverty in America. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox, please sign up here: I’ve always been interested in how race and class shape our society and my work often focuses on topics like criminal justice, housing, and the social safety net. But while I like to point out problems, I also think that’s only half of my job. The other half is to ask, “Now what?” That’s what this newsletter will do. Some issues will dig into the specific ways that poverty punishes people across the country. Others will look at policies that either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. The overarching goal is to find tangible solutions to improve people’s lives. And so if you, like me, think that poverty is a problem that can be eradicated in the United States, then think of this newsletter as a way for us to envision what a realistic path toward that future could look like. Why so many Americans are poor America has gone through many ups and downs since the civil rights era, but one thing has remained remarkably constant: In 1970, 12.6 percent of Americans were considered poor; in 2023, that number was 11.1 percent — or 36.8 million people. “To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote last year.  It might seem as though the persistence of poverty in the United States says something about how intractable the problem is. This is, after all, the richest country in the world. If America can’t rid itself of poverty, then who can? But it’s not that America can’t do it; it’s that it chooses not to. That said, there isn’t a single answer to why so many Americans continue to be stuck in poverty. It is true, for example, that the American welfare system is broken, consistently undermined, and, in some cases, set up to fail. Studies have shown that programs like work requirements don’t work, and states have been caught hoarding billions of dollars worth of welfare funds instead of distributing them among the people they’re intended for.  But it’s also true that an extraordinary amount of money and effort go into establishing and administering antipoverty programs, and many of them do succeed. Social Security, for example, keeps more than 20 million people above the poverty line.  In recent years, America showed just how much of a choice poverty is: The short-lived pandemic-era child tax credit expansion cut child poverty by more than a third. And the bolstered social safety net from Covid relief bills nearly halved child poverty in a single year — the sharpest drop on record. Once those programs expired, however, the child poverty rate bounced right back. One reason poverty is so stubborn Last year, many homeowners in Lexington, Massachusetts came out to oppose zoning changes that would allow for more housing to be built in the wealthy Boston suburb. The people who needed the new housing were, understandably, not impressed.  “How do you think it makes me feel when some people from a point of great privilege say that they don’t want the type of multifamily housing that I live in because it may look ugly or doesn’t fit the essence of this town?” one young resident, whose family relied on multifamily housing to be able to live in Lexington, told the town legislature. “Are we really setting the bar of entry to be a $1 million dollar house to join our community?” This situation is one answer to the question of what makes the problem of poverty so complicated: competing interests. The reality is that too many people benefit from the existence of poverty. The economy already pits too many groups against each other, leaving many Americans afraid that they have too much to lose should we choose to build a more equitable society.  Homeowners are told that their homes are the key to building wealth, so they reasonably want their property values to keep rising. For renters, on the other hand, any increase in housing costs is a loss. So while renters might want lawmakers to make room for more housing, homeowners often resist any change that could make their home prices stagnate.This is one theme we’ll be exploring in Within Our Means — who stands to benefit and who stands to lose from the policies our lawmakers choose to pursue. We’ll also be looking at questions about fairness, political viability, and why antipoverty programs ought to be viewed as investments rather than handouts. And though we’ll often look at economic arguments, we also won’t shy away from arriving at morally driven conclusions. Sometimes, a program that helps the most vulnerable people is still worth paying for even if it doesn’t necessarily help the economy grow. It doesn’t have to be this way Even when divergent interests exist — like those between renters and homeowners — change is possible: Lexington ended up approving the necessary zoning changes to build more housing, and neighboring towns followed its lead.  This was not, by any means, an inevitable or easy outcome. For many decades, Lexington and its neighbors had been symbols of liberal hypocrisy — the kinds of places where you might see “Black Lives Matter” and “refugees are welcome” signs, but vehement opposition to any new housing project that would help desegregate the region. But one lesson out of Lexington is that sometimes people need a push. It wasn’t just that the town residents had a sudden change of heart — though some residents had clearly been troubled by their own history. The state had enacted a law requiring jurisdictions served by public transit to authorize building more multifamily housing if they wanted to receive certain state funding. Whether the town ends up building the housing units that would make the suburb more affordable depends on whether residents put their money where their mouth is. But at least now, the door has been opened. Some of the changes needed to eradicate poverty are small, unsexy bureaucratic adjustments, like local zoning reforms in Lexington and elsewhere. Others require an ambitious rethinking.  The project of ending poverty will be costly, but it’s long been clear that America can afford it. If more than two-thirds of household wealth is concentrated among the top 10 percent while the bottom half of households own a mere 2.5 percent, then nobody should be living in squalor.  “Now there is nothing new about poverty,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said nearly 60 years ago. “What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will.” Share your thoughts If you have any ideas, thoughts, or a personal experience with antipoverty programs that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at abdallah.fayyad@vox.com. This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.

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On Tuesday night, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, a man who may well have been innocent of the crime he was convicted of. No physical evidence linked Williams to the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle in her Missouri home, and his trial was marked by a shoddy defense and a jury-selection process that empaneled 11 white jurors and only one Black juror (Gayle was white; Williams was Black). Williams’s execution had been scheduled and halted twice before amid concerns about his guilt; Missouri’s prior governor, Eric Greitens, not only granted Williams a day-of stay but also appointed a committee to investigate his case. The committee was dissolved by the current governor, Mike Parson, in 2023 without ever issuing a report.Earlier this year, Wesley Bell, the current prosecutor of the district where Williams was convicted, filed a 63-page motion in court seeking to set aside Williams’s death sentence on grounds of possible innocence, and later offered Williams a deal that would have commuted his sentence to life without parole. But Missouri’s attorney general rejected the plan, and Williams is now dead. Bell issued a statement after the execution, saying, “If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”Why are innocent people—and those with a good chance of proving their innocence—still being executed? A death sentence does not necessarily reflect guilt, which is why death-row exonerations are not uncommon. By the Equal Justice Initiave’s count, one person is exonerated for every eight people executed. And not everyone who is innocent is exonerated. The Death Penalty Information Center maintains a list of executed people who had “strong evidence of innocence”; it numbers 20 cases, almost all of which are from the past few decades. Other sources offer higher estimates. “At least 30, and likely more, innocent people have been executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed in the 1970s,” Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told me.The likelihood of executing innocents has moved several state legislatures to end the death penalty within their borders. As the governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley cited innocence in his 2013 decision to sign a bill abolishing capital punishment. So did then-Governor Pat Quinn in 2011 in Illinois. “Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death-penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it,” Quinn said. “With our broken system, we cannot ensure justice is achieved in every case.”[Elizabeth Bruenig: Not that innocent]Surveys suggest that supporters of capital punishment are aware of the possibility of executing innocent people. According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of Americans acknowledge that there is some risk that innocent people will be executed; only 21 percent say that there are adequate safeguards in place to prevent it. Moreover, only 30 percent of death-penalty supporters say that the criminal-justice system successfully prevents the execution of innocents. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 59 percent of respondents said they believed that innocent people had been executed within the previous five years.It’s not possible that current supporters of capital punishment simply don’t realize that the death penalty occasionally results in the execution of innocents. They must know, and they support it anyway. I suspect this is because capital punishment serves a variety of purposes; carrying out justice is merely one. Perhaps death-penalty advocates don’t care about the lives being extinguished, innocent or not—death-row prisoners are disproportionately Black and poor. And perhaps others are loath to admit that the criminal-justice system is prone to error. But for some, the death penalty offers another major benefit: It is an opportunity for the state to exhibit ultimate force, the destruction of a human life. From that perspective, innocence versus guilt only distantly matters. Some people welcome displays of state power—think military parades—because a government capable of destruction is also one strong enough to offer protection. That many small-government conservatives nevertheless wish to see that kind of power in the hands of the state is not just ironic; it is a major obstacle to the abolition of the death penalty.America is currently experiencing an execution spree: One person was executed the week before last, four this past week, and three more are scheduled for October. Maybe all of the people being put to death now are guilty, but there’s more than a sliver of a chance that someone among them is or was innocent—that’s eight executions, after all. For some, that falls between a worthwhile risk and a necessary evil. For others, it’s just murder.

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