As we prepare for a new year, new Congress and new presidential administration, “Marketplace Morning Report” is exploring new narratives that illustrate how the U.S. economy is — and is not — working for people. To help us with this, we’re turning to the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which provides support to independent journalists who are taking a fresh look at inequality in this economy.
The aim is to hear from journalists and writers from many walks of life and economic circumstances.
We start with a reexamination of the “American Dream.” If the economic ladder is harder to climb these days, what do Americans need to change that? Lifting yourself up by your bootstraps? Government policy?
Alissa Quart is executive director at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author of “Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream,” a book that examines poverty as a systemic inequality issue. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: In this new administration, we know there’ll be a lot of focus on illegal immigration, perhaps on immigrants more generally. But given your work, would you expect there would be a lot more attention paid to people improving their livelihoods by making different life choices, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps?
Alissa Quart: If you look at J.D. Vance, he has dedicated his whole career up until now, “Hillbilly Elegy,” to this whole story about getting away from those so-called lazy people that he grew up around in Appalachia. At the same time, he’s pretending to be a working-class hero.
Brancaccio: It’s not just him. I remember seeing that Pew study from a few years ago that the leading thing causing economic inequality in America, if you ask Republicans, is people making certain choices in their life. But even 27% of Democrats thought that was among the things contributing to it.
Quart: Absolutely. We’ve been taught the story about the deserving rich and the undeserving poor for generations, and the undeserving poor in this story are people who depend on entitlements. That’s what they call them, but they’re really things like welfare or even apprenticeship programs. And then the deserving rich are people who are doing super well in this economy, in this country, and it’s due to some inherent gift. This idea that we’re doing this all on our own is a fiction.
Brancaccio: Many voters, it appears, saw economic redemption in Donald Trump’s candidacy. The system wasn’t working for them, and he said he would break the system. The system that President-elect Trump inherits and that he talks about changing you’re even saying now does leave a very wide gap between the rich and poor?
Quart: Yeah. I mean, we’re gonna have rising costs from some of these plans. You know, one of the things that happens when people are lower income is they look for simpler solutions, because they’re exhausted by life coming at them. And it’s not just lower income, it’s middle-class people too. In this country right now, it’s like a game of that 1980s game of “Asteroids.” Things are hitting you, boom, boom, boom, and you can’t see clearly. So you want to hear these solutions like, “Oh yeah, it’s tariffs.” I think Trump said “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. You know, you want to hear someone say that and think that’s going to help me. But things are more complex. It’s often a kind of whole network of social programs and forces that keep people afloat, and we’re not seeing that yet from the Republicans.
Brancaccio: We’ve done polling over the years, different administrations in power. And people always say they think the system is rigged for someone else. That is not a recipe for social cohesion, bringing people together.
Quart: I think one of the things that really works in political language is blame for me. Personally, I think this [election cycle] was an opportunity that some of the Democrats missed, to blame people who were not being taxed adequately, to blame people at the top of the social gradient, if we were going to blame anybody. And that was not taken up. And I do think the experience of working people was not being fully acknowledged. I know there’s a lot of resentment, but some of the resentment’s deserved. If we’re looking at an economy based on the GDP or stock market returns, yeah, then all these people griping that they’re struggling are deluded. But if we’re looking at the people who are trying to afford their groceries, who are working multiple jobs, some of this is real resentment that’s been related to people’s experience, and some of that’s ginned up. And we have to separate these two things.
Brancaccio: I mean, I think a useful undertaking in this new Republican-controlled Congress that’s heading this way and the second Trump administration will be to evaluate whether emerging economic policies help struggling people or help the affluent, or help or hurt both.
Quart: I looked at some of the tax plans from Trump, and it looked like people who make between $60,000 and $100,000 — which is middle class — would save something like $1,000 a year, whereas people in the top 1%, $36,000 a year. I don’t know what these tax cuts are going to do for families like mine or the people I work with.
Brancaccio: Your organization, in a way, is an antidote to elite experts dominating the media narrative on economic issues.
Quart: Yeah, and so one thing that I keep thinking about is, I want there to be more of a working-class media. I want there to be the renter writing about real estate, and the person who goes to the mom-and-pop-store writing about food. I’m hoping to get more of a working-class media together on a nonprofit level, because I think that this is part of why ordinary people have come to distrust the media. They’re not hearing themselves or their neighbors. You know, people talk about local a lot, but is this local going to be by people that haven’t been shipped in from New York reporting or are they actually from the community? And the reason it’s important that it’s from people from the community, is people trust community reporting. Also, they trust things they’ve seen with their own eyes. So if you have a reporter who’s reporting something — a fire that you’ve actually seen — you’re going to not be able to buy into some kind of QAnon fantasy about the media. It’s almost serving a media literacy function.
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