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poverty
3 Reasons Using AI in Decision-Making Harms Low-Income Americans
All told, 92 million low-income people in the United States—those with incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty line—have some key aspect of life decided by AI.
Feb 01, 2025
The billions of dollars poured into artificial intelligence, or AI, haven’t delivered on the technology’s promised revolutions, such as better medical treatment, advances in scientific research, or increased worker productivity.
So, the AI hype train purveys the underwhelming: slightly smarter phones, text-prompted graphics, and quicker report-writing (if the AI hasn’t made things up). Meanwhile, there’s a dark underside to the technology that goes unmentioned by AI’s carnival barkers—the widespread harm that AI presently causes low-income people.
AI and related technologies are used by governments, employers, landlords, banks, educators, and law enforcement to wrongly cut in-home caregiving services for disabled people; accuse unemployed workers of fraud; deny people housing, employment, or credit; take kids from loving parents and put them in foster care; intensify domestic violence and sexual abuse or harassment; label and mistreat middle- and high-school kids as likely dropouts or criminals; and falsely accuse Black and brown people of crimes.
With additional support from philanthropy and civil society, low-income communities and their advocates can better resist the immediate harms and build political power needed to achieve long-term protection against the ravages of AI.
All told, 92 million low-income people in the United States—those with incomes less than 200% of the federal poverty line—have some key aspect of life decided by AI, according to a new report by TechTonic Justice. This shift towards AI decision-making carries risks not present in the human-centered methods that precede them and defies all existing accountability mechanisms.
First, AI expands the scale of risk far beyond individual decision-makers. Sure, humans can make mistakes or be biased. But their reach is limited to the people they directly make decisions about. In cases of landlords, direct supervisors, or government caseworkers, that might top out at a few hundred people. But with AI, the risks of misapplied policies, coding errors, bias, or cruelty are centralized through the system and applied to masses of people ranging from several thousand to millions at a time.
Second, the use of AI and the reasons for its decisions are not easily known by the people subject to them. Government agencies and businesses often have no obligation to affirmatively disclose that they are using AI. And even if they do, they might not divulge the key information needed to understand how the systems work.
Third, the supposed sophistication of AI lends a cloak of rationality to policy decisions that are hostile to low-income people. This paves the way for further implementation of bad policy for these communities. Benefit cuts, such as those to in-home care services that I fought against for disabled people, are masked as objective determinations of need. Or workplace management and surveillance systems that undermine employee stability and safety pass as tools to maximize productivity. To invoke the proverb, AI wolves use sheep avatars.
The scale, opacity, and costuming of AI make harmful decisions difficult to fight on an individual level. How can you prove that AI was wrong if you don’t even know that it is being used or how it works? And, even if you do, will it matter when the AI’s decision is backed up by claims of statistical sophistication and validity, no matter how dubious?
On a broader level, existing accountability mechanisms don’t rein in harmful AI. AI-related scandals in public benefit systems haven’t turned into political liabilities for the governors in charge of failing Medicaid or Unemployment Insurance systems in Texas and Florida, for example. And the agency officials directly implementing such systems are often protected by the elected officials whose agendas they are executing.
Nor does the market discipline wayward AI uses against low-income people. One major developer of eligibility systems for state Medicaid programs has secured $6 billion in contracts even though its systems have failed in similar ways in multiple states. Likewise, a large data broker had no problem winning contracts with the federal government even after a security breach divulged the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans.
Existing laws similarly fall short. Without any meaningful AI-specific legislation, people must apply existing legal claims to the technology. Usually based on anti-discrimination laws or procedural requirements like getting adequate explanations for decisions, these claims are often available only after the harm has happened and offer limited relief. While such lawsuits have had some success, they alone are not the answer. After all, lawsuits are expensive; low-income people can’t afford attorneys; and quality, no-cost representation available through legal aid programs may not be able to meet the demand.
Right now, unaccountable AI systems make unchallengeable decisions about low-income people at unfathomable scales. Federal policymakers won’t make things better. The Trump administration quickly rescinded protective AI guidance that former U.S. President Joe Biden issued. And, with President Donald Trump and Congress favoring industry interests, short-term legislative fixes are unlikely.
Still, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Community-based resistance has long fueled social change. With additional support from philanthropy and civil society, low-income communities and their advocates can better resist the immediate harms and build political power needed to achieve long-term protection against the ravages of AI.
Organizations like mine, TechTonic Justice, will empower these frontline communities and advocates with battle-tested strategies that incorporate litigation, organizing, public education, narrative advocacy, and other dimensions of change-making. In the end, fighting from the ground up is our best hope to take AI-related injustice down.
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Resisting Trump Isn’t Enough; We Need a Plan for a Better World
The promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think.
Jan 24, 2025
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, advocates for peace, social justice, racial and economic equality, fair immigration policies, climate renewal, trans rights, and other movements for change are bracing for hard times. The new administration will be doggedly opposed to so many of the values we hold dear, as well as programs that have helped keep millions of Americans above the poverty line.
Only recently, newly reelected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) reaffirmed his commitment to an “America First” agenda, which distills the most harmful aspirations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 into 10 priority areas, including slashing social welfare, healthcare programs, and public education; supporting increased military spending to promote “peace through strength”; unleashing a nightmarish version of immigration enforcement; and restricting voting rights.
Many of us are now asking ourselves, how did we end up here? Part of the answer is simple enough: The status quo, regardless of which party has been in power, simply hasn’t been working for all too many Americans. Research compiled by our colleague Shailly Gupta Barnes of the Kairos Center indicates that some 140 million of us live either in poverty or one financial emergency away from joining the ranks of the poor. One out of six children in this country now lives below the official poverty line, and the families of nearly half of all kids are in a state of economic precarity or food insecurity. Meanwhile, the average life span of white American males is actually declining, while more than 20 million people lost their access to healthcare in 2024 alone.
This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see.
All of this is, of course, a far cry from the conventional wisdom that America’s economy is doing well, based on statistics like the unemployment rate or the rate of economic growth as a whole, none of which capture the lived experience of so many of us. Indeed, the head of Moody’s Analytics recently told the Financial Times that, while “high-income households are doing fine, the bottom third of U.S. consumers are tapped out.”
Although the system isn’t working for millions of Americans, a business-as-usual, market-based approach remains what’s on offer in official Washington. This has been the governing modus operandi across party lines for the past 30 years and continues to enjoy bipartisan support, even as faith in government declines in the country as a whole. Without a viable plan that could change the basic living conditions of people in need, it’s easier for right-wing populists to offer false promises of change or, even worse, provide scapegoats like undocumented immigrants to “explain” declining living standards and the outright desperation so many people now feel.
Of course, this propaganda is fueled by countless millions of dollars contributed by rich donors, often enough billionaires, who, for starters, want more tax cuts, more deregulation of business, unfettered access to government contracts, and free rein for cryptocurrency. It’s reinforced by proponents of religious nationalism who organize around single issues like opposition to abortion, while falsely portraying moves towards racial and gender equality as “threats” to Christian values. Over the past several years, such interests have combined forces to usher Donald Trump back into the White House and dozens of “Christian nationalists” into the judicial and legislative branches of government, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Contrary to mainstream accounts that put the responsibility for Trump’s rise and then return to power on working-class voters (some of whom did indeed press the lever for him), the real victors in the November elections were the wealthy and powerful, many of whom used their public profiles and deep pockets to help propel the Trump-Vance ticket to victory. They and their corporations are now ready to receive ample government contracts and benefit from the erasure of corporate regulations. Meanwhile, religious extremists will welcome further encroachment on reproductive and LGBTQ rights.
Case in point: On the day that Donald Trump was pronounced victorious in the 2024 election, the eight richest men in the world were instantly worth another $64 billion. Nevertheless, much of the analysis surrounding the 2024 elections continues to emphasize the notion that Trump’s victory was primarily due to decisions made by the working class and the poorest Americans.
So, what is to be done? This is no time to blame those who are going to be hurt by Trump’s draconian policies, nor is it a moment to get in a defensive crouch to fight off only the worst policies in the making without also putting forth a vision of the world we’d actually like to see, a world where people’s needs are met with real programs, not diversionary rhetoric and false promises.
Promoting a Government That Works for All
While people like billionaire Elon Musk are busy hatching schemes to dismantle large parts of the federal government, we need to push for an agenda in which the government actually works for everyone. Shifting federal budget priorities toward improving lives and away from war spending and tax breaks for the rich would be a central element of such a program. Pouring resources—more than a trillion dollars a year—into the war machine and the national security state starves other priorities, ranging from public health to environmental protection. In fact, defunding such programs, an essential part of Trump’s second-term plans, risks another pandemic or the “quad-demic” that health officials have been warning about, as well as increased hunger, untreated medical conditions, and dirtier air and water. The problems to come won’t just involve an imbalance on a spreadsheet. There are all too many lives at stake, as surely as lives are at stake in a shooting war.
Imagine how starkly different this country would be if we were to invest in the lives of people rather than filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Take the expanded (and fully refundable) child tax credit, or CTC. Created in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan, this federal policy granted modest monthly cash payments to families with children, including poor families, independent of their work or tax status. Families making less than $150,000 received regular cash infusions they could use to pay daily expenses or shore up slim to nonexistent savings.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality healthcare.
The results were staggering. By December 2021, that program had reached more than 61 million children, nearly 4 million of whom had been lifted above the official poverty line. In its first and only year, official child poverty witnessed a dramatic decline, the single largest drop in American history, including a 25% decrease in poverty among Black children, narrowing the overall racial gap among poor kids. At the time, Moody’s estimated that the impact of the CTC on the economy was comparable to, if not greater than, the jobs created through military spending.
Despite its success, the expanded CTC was abandoned as 2021 ended. Two Democrats and 49 Republicans voted to end it, with West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin claiming that poor families might be using the money to buy drugs. The CTC, of course, hadn’t failed. The failure was that of an impoverished democracy, increasingly captive to the interests of the rich and powerful and willing to leave nearly half the population living hand to mouth, despite proven policies that could help lift the load of poverty.
And consider that the real danger of the second Trump administration, which has already appointed a record 13 billionaires to government posts, is its debt to the enormously wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. You need look no further than Trump’s cozy relationship with future trillionaire Elon Musk. As head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with business interests in the very institutions he’ll have some authority over, Musk will also, it seems, have an undue influence on future federal budgets, priorities, and programs. Indeed, before the inauguration, Musk and former DOGE co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy had already set their sights on shutting down the Department of Education and cutting about one-third of the federal government’s annual budget, or $2 trillion.
We’re preparing for this and more in the coming weeks and months, but it doesn’t need to be this way.
What Is to Be Done?
In 1968, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing against the triple evils of racism, militarism, and poverty in what would be the last crusade of his life, he said, “Power for poor people will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of this nation say yes when they may be desirous to say no.” His theory of change was to turn those most adversely impacted by poverty into a political force powerful enough not to be denied, even by the greatest economic and military power in the world.
Under the second Trump administration, there will be a torrent of emergencies to deal with, including threats of mass deportation, the shredding of the social safety net, and attacks on efforts to promote racial and economic justice and gender equality. Some of this will be new to us, including potentially massive immigration raids on schools and churches, while much of it has already been unfolding at a state level. For example, in 2024 alone, more than 650 bills were introduced nationwide to restrict the rights of trans people. Because such bills were massively unpopular, well over 600 of them failed. This may change, however, if they’re taken up at the federal level in 2025.
What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
As people of conscience fight back against such assaults, we should connect that resistance to calls for a government that reflects our deepest values and commitments to justice. To fight for such a future means making demands that are far beyond what’s politically possible now. Simply resisting what Donald Trump’s government tries to do won’t be enough. We need to build public support for a robust, carefully crafted plan for public investment that will be a viable stepping-stone toward a more equitable, peaceful, and just world.
During the first Trump administration, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival produced an ambitious social and economic agenda, “The Poor People’s Moral Budget: Everybody’s Got a Right to Live.” It called for the right to living-wage jobs, affordable housing, debt cancellation, strong anti-poverty programs, guaranteed adequate income, and much more. It made clear that, through far fairer taxation and the shifting of funds from bloated military budgets to programs of social uplift, it would be possible to “lift from the bottom” in America.
Imagine a country where everyone could exist free of the fear of poverty, hunger, homelessness, or lack of access to quality healthcare. Of course, trying to shift this country’s priorities in such a way would pose a major political challenge, but social and political organizations and movements have succeeded in the past, even in the darkest of times. The organizing of the Citizen’s Army during the Mine Wars in West Virginia early in the last century and the birth of the labor union movement successfully pressured both corporations and the government for better wages and working conditions that workers still benefit from today. In the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, military veterans in the Bonus Army Encampment in Washington, D.C., demanded that the government pay those promised “bonuses” and won. The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Programs fed more children in the late 1960s than any other institutional entity. It paved the way for free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools across the country, while calling out the failures of the government to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. During those same years, welfare rights leaders formed the largest poor people’s organization of the time and secured essential benefits for tens of thousands of people, while more than doubling the amount of federal support flowing to the poorest Americans.
Because they did it then, we can do it now.
This is not to suggest that shifting funds from the Pentagon to domestic programs is a magic solution to America’s economic problems. Even cutting the Pentagon budget in half would not be enough to meet all this country’s unmet needs. That would require a comprehensive package, involving a major shift in budget priorities; an increase in federal revenues; and a crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse in the expenditure of government loans and grants. It would, in fact, require the kind of attention and focus now reserved for war planning.
Imagine a real war on poverty, not the “skirmish” (as Dr. King called it) of the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s effort that would be cut short by the war in Vietnam. What’s needed is a coordinated series of campaigns that could change the conditions that produce poverty for good.
Now, let’s be real: 2025 is going to be a truly hard year for the poor and vulnerable in our society. But the promise and possibility of ending poverty, reclaiming democracy, and advancing peace and justice remain closer than any of us may think. What’s needed is to begin to build something better, with, as Dr. King suggested, “the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness, and the aggressiveness” to make it so.
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'A New Aristocracy': Billionaire Wealth Surged by $2 Trillion Last Year
"The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable," said the executive director of Oxfam International.
Jan 20, 2025
An Oxfam report published Monday shows that the combined wealth of the world's billionaires surged three times faster in 2024 than the previous year, rising by $2 trillion as efforts to combat global poverty remained stagnant.
The findings come hours before the U.S. is set to inaugurate President-elect Donald Trump, a billionaire whose campaign for a second White House term was backed by the world's richest man and whose proposed Cabinet is stacked with billionaires. The report was also released as business and political elites gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum summit.
According to Oxfam, an average of nearly four new billionaires emerged every week in 2024, and billionaires saw their wealth grow by roughly $5.7 billion per day.
"The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable," said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International's executive director. "The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated—by three times—but so too has their power."
"The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world's richest man Elon Musk, running the world's largest economy," Behar added. "We present this report as a stark wake-up call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few."
"Untaxed billions of dollars in inheritance is an affront to fairness, perpetuating a new aristocracy where wealth and power stays locked in the hands of a few."
Oxfam's new report—titled Takers, Not Makers—estimates that 36% of billionaire wealth is inherited and 18% stems from monopoly power accrued by corporate behemoths such as Amazon. Every billionaire under the age of 30 inherited their wealth, according to Oxfam.
Another 6% of global billionaire wealth can be attributed to "crony sources" such as "lobbying, funding political campaigns, and creating revolving doors between the private sector and civil service," the new report finds.
All told, "most billionaire wealth is taken, not earned—60% comes from either inheritance, cronyism and corruption, or monopoly power," the report estimates.
"The ultra-rich like to tell us that getting rich takes skill, grit, and hard work. But the truth is most wealth is taken, not made," said Behar. "So many of the so-called 'self-made' are actually heirs to vast fortunes, handed down through generations of unearned privilege. Untaxed billions of dollars in inheritance is an affront to fairness, perpetuating a new aristocracy where wealth and power stays locked in the hands of a few."
If current trends persist, Oxfam estimates that the world is on track to see at least five trillionaires within a decade.
"Last year we predicted the first trillionaire could emerge within a decade, but this shocking acceleration of wealth means that the world is now on course for at least five," said Anna Marriott, Oxfam's inequality policy lead. "The global economic system is broken, wholly unfit for purpose as it enables and perpetuates this explosion of riches, while nearly half of humanity continues to live in poverty."
In the face of such staggering wealth accumulation at the very top, Oxfam called on governments to abolish tax havens, tax the inheritances of the ultra-rich, more strictly regulate corporations to "ensure they pay living wages and cap CEO pay," and provide debt relief to economically struggling nations to "end the flow of wealth from South to North."
"Taken together, today's levels of extreme wealth concentration are based not on merit," said Oxfam. "These are takers, and not makers."
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