Mark Rank debunks the myths of poverty

When President Ronald Reagan conjured the “welfare queen” in his 1976 presidential campaign, he created an enduring and damaging myth that people living in poverty were lazy, cheating, minority, urban and female. In fact, more than half of Americans will live part of their life below the poverty line at some point in their lives. And most Americans in poverty are white and do not live in cities. This is one of many myths about poverty that are debunked by Mark Rank in his new book, Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty. Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis, is considered one of the foremost experts on issues of poverty and social inequality. On the Vermont Conversation, Rank discusses the truth about poverty in America and the obstacles that stand in the way of going from rags to riches. He believes that the U.S. could be at a turning point in how it deals with poverty. “One of the silver linings of the pandemic is it reveals the fact that [poverty] doesn’t have anything to do with people’s motivation or not working hard enough. This is a collapse on a very systematic level,” Rank says. To address post-pandemic poverty, “we need to think very big. I think that’s what Joe Biden is doing. He’s thinking FDR or LBJ, [whose] programs had a really significant effect on improving people’s lives.”