Moral Policy = Good Economics: Lifting up Poor and Working-Class People--And Our Whole Economy

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the United States was already deeply unequal. Before the pandemic, 140 million Americans were poor or near poor, living just one emergency above the poverty line. Inequality in the United States did not happen suddenly and cannot be explained as the consequence of individual failures; rather, decades of public policies brought the United States to this point, making the rich richer at the expense of everybody else. This article is a collaboration between the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival--a moral movement rooted in the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that is organizing around the needs and demands of the 140 million--and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)--an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that uses economic research and analysis to understand and improve the economic conditions of workers and their families. In this article, the authors evaluate the public policies that shaped the preexisting conditions of the pandemic, policies that were by no means accidental or morally neutral, and lay out the policies that are needed to counter and reverse the status quo, including the heightened suffering from the pandemic.