Americans have endured economic crises before but none quite like this one. To capture the depths of the suffering, The New York Times teamed up with 11 local news organizations across the country to document the lives of a dozen Americans who found themselves out of work. Read the full special report here.
From “The Week” Pandemic poverty: A growing catastrophe
With federal stimulus checks long since spent and no more aid coming soon, many American workers and business owners have tumbled into financial disaster, said Eli Rosenberg and Heather Long at The Washington Post. Among them is Ninfa Rodriguez of Milwaukee, a 56-year-old who lost her job of 18 years at a casino in March. When her husband, a forklift driver, also lost his job this summer, the pair turned to credit cards to get by. “My world has been turned upside down,” she said. Wade Benz, owner of a logo-printing business outside Nashville, has already reduced his workforce from 50 employees to 22 as his business plunged by 60 percent. He chokes up as he considers those remaining, many of them long-timers. “I may have to look my workers in the eye soon and lay them off,” he said.
A staggering number of Americans are falling into poverty, said Jason DeParle at The New York Times. Since May, the number of poor in the U.S. has grown by 8 million, a new Columbia University study found. Six million became poor over the past three months alone, according to a second study, from the Universities of Chicago and Notre Dame. Now that checks from the $2 trillion Cares Act have disappeared, Americans “are having a lot more trouble paying their bills, paying their rent, putting food on the table,” said economist Bruce Meyer.
For those already living “in or at the edge of poverty,” the pandemic’s effects “have been especially devastating,” said Jackie Mader at USA Today. Kaneadsha Jones, an Army vet who had been supporting her four children with a job at a call center, now faces possible eviction and car repossession. To keep her kids fed, Jones is rationing food and hasn’t eaten herself for as much as three days. The pandemic has dramatically widened income inequality in the U.S., said Fareed Zakaria at The Washington Post. For professionals who can work via laptops and Zoom, “life goes on,” but for the bottom 25 percent, it “has cratered.” It’s hard not to wonder if “the relative normalcy of life for elites” has blinded us to the growing catastrophe. For tens of millions of Americans, “this is the Great Depression. Can we please help them?”