Poverty could end in America but it won’t as long as people profit from it, according to sociologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond, a leading authority on why the poor stay poor.

In the past 50 years, Americans invented the internet, raised life expectancy by a decade, and reduced deaths from heart disease by around 70 percent. However, there was almost no progress on reducing the national poverty rate, which was 12 percent in 1970 and 11 percent in 2019.

In his new book, “Poverty, by America” (published March 21, 2023), Desmond proposes a reason for the lack of progress: large U.S. companies and many individuals profit from tens of millions of Americans living in poverty.

In a CNBC interview, Desmond offers a solution: less aid to the rich and more aid to the poor. “If just the top 1 percent of us just paid the taxes we owe — not pay more taxes, but just stop evading tax bills — we as a nation could raise $175 billion more every year. That’s almost enough to pull everyone out of poverty,” he said.

The immediate argument against ending poverty, Desmond said, is that it would be too expensive. But we already have an enforcement agency ready to act.

“The answer is staring us right in the face. We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job,” he said.

Desmond was a professor in 2015 when he won a MacArthur “genius grant.” In 2016, he earned a Pulitzer for his bestselling book, “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.”

“There are all these books about poverty, and I started asking, Where’s the tension in the story? Who is the bad guy? Is there a bad guy? Are there really 38 million people in this country who are poor, and it’s no one’s fault?” he said in a Publishers Weekly report.

Desmond argues that the problem of poverty in the richest country in the world isn’t unsolvable—it’s just that “highly entrenched, privileged citizens live comfortable lives that are enabled and
preserved by the systematic exploitation of the poor and powerless,” Andy Kifer wrote or Publishers Weekly. “Who are these people? Look in the mirror, Desmond argues; they’re us.”

Black people have the highest poverty rate in the U.S., according to U.S. poverty statistics. While the overall poverty rate is 11.6 percent, in 2021, 19.5 percent of Black people living in the U.S. were living below the poverty line compared to 8.2 percent of white people.

As unions started losing power in the U.S., wages suffered and CEO compensation grew, Desmond said. “Corporations have used that economic power and transferred it into political power to make organizing hard and to combat unionization efforts.”

Desmond wants all Americans to become “poverty abolitionists.” Why use the word “abolitionists”?

“I think that it shares with other abolitionist movements a commitment to the end of poverty. It views poverty not as something that we should get a little better at, but something we should abolish. Because it’s a sin. It’s a disgrace,” he told CNBC.

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Photo: A homeless man sleeps on the steps of a police station in Los Angeles’ Skid Row area, home to the largest concentration of homeless people in the U.S., Sept. 19, 2017. (AP/Jae C. Hong, File)