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Part One:
We speak with Greg Kaufmann, contributing writer to The Nation, about the unspoken truth about poverty in America. We like to think of our country as providing a “safety net” to protect our most vulnerable people. The safety net of public benefits exists to make sure that, when people fall into poverty — when they lose their jobs, develop serious health problems, or get trapped by the opioid crisis — they are still able to survive with shelter, food, health care etc.
The truth is that the U.S. safety net does not cover even half of a family’s costs of subsisting. Nevertheless, Pres. Trump has made this situation even worse. He has proposed “redefining” poverty, i.e., pretending that many of the folks who currently qualify for safety net benefits will no longer be deemed poor enough to qualify. By one stroke of the pen, Trump will be able to claim that he reduced poverty in the US by a significant percentage. Of course, these families didn’t suddenly win the lottery and therefore no longer need a helping hand. The government simply asserts that they are no longer “poor.”
Part Two:
We speak with Michael Lewis, a former Assistant Attorney General in New Hampshire who prosecuted the only man to be sentenced to death in NH in 70 years. During the course of this prosecution, Lewis (and a number of other lawyers) had to research and litigate many legal challenges — to the death penalty in general and to its application to the defendant in particular.
Lewis shed light on the enormous costs to NH citizens that were caused by the State’s decision to devote so many resources to this one prosecution. Meanwhile, all of those resources had to be diverted from some other part of the AG’s budget, which greatly reduced the amount of work the department could do in support of other important state issues: child protection cases, consumer fraud cases, civil rights cases, and environmental pollution cases.
We realized that, in addition to thinking about this prosecution in the context of only the one case before us, we also must consider the big picture: how does the state’s devoting so many resources to one case reduce the amount of work the government can do to help many other people.
