A nation of Scrooges Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, is the author of “Poverty, by America” and “Evicted” recalls that when abroad he’s heard heard the phrase “American-style deprivation” on several occasions. “Anyone who has visited [peer] countries can plainly see the difference, can experience what it might be like to live in a country without widespread public decay.” “The United States has a poverty problem,” Desmond explains. It is a tragedy and a national shame (New York Times): A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to at minimum double their incomes just to reach the poverty line. Programs like housing assistance and food stamps are effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year. But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage. Not that Americans see their country for what it is. Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty…