Cash Isn't Going to Solve All the Poor's Problems
To ensure people's basic needs are met for the long term, we need to tailor programs to meet the particular challenges of housing, health care and nutrition.
Cash alone won’t fix it.
Photographer: Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
Right now, many ideas for helping lower-income Americans revolve around giving them cash. That includes Covid-19 relief checks, extended unemployment benefits and the dueling child tax-credit proposals by President Joe Biden and Senator Mitt Romney. But periodic cash can't solve all problems. There’s a strong argument for focusing on making sure that all Americans have long-term access to the basic physical necessities of life.
In a recent essay, economist Eli Dourado points out that those basics — food, shelter, health care and utilities — make up a larger share of spending for the people at the bottom of the income distribution. Taking just the first three (since utilities are combined with other things in the data), it’s easy to see that lower-income people have to spend more of what they have on necessities: