What is Poverty?

[Amy Hulst]:
Today we’ll dive into how we define poverty in America, why it’s our number one problem, who is to blame, and who should help.

Hi, this is Amy Hulst, and you’re listening to From Poverty to Prosperity, where we ask what keeps people in poverty in America and what it takes to break free.

Jason, great to see you. I haven’t seen you yet today. This is the first time I’ve seen you.

[Jason Janz]:
Really? Yeah. How’s that going for you?

[Amy Hulst]:
It’s good. It was helpful. It was helpful that you weren’t there in the morning. I got more things done today.

[Jason Janz]:
That’s awesome. What are you working on?

[Amy Hulst]:
So many things for you.

[Jason Janz]:
What do you like working on the most?

[Amy Hulst]:
I really enjoy this. Prepping for this was very fun yesterday and today. And I’ve really enjoyed holding on to our national network of people who have replicated our model elsewhere, and talking with new cities about where they want to see our model where they are. You shared the story of CrossPurpose this morning with a Leader class.

[Jason Janz]:
Yes, I did. I did. It was, yeah, beautiful. We opened up a fourth campus, and we have two classes out there. I spoke to all of them, and there was a man in the class who is friends with my son’s junior high quarterback, who actually went through CrossPurpose. He told me how his friend was doing, and his friends went and told him about CrossPurpose. So it was great to see him there and meet them, just some sweet folks.

[Amy Hulst]:
Awesome. That’s great. You share founder’s heart, we call it Founder’s Heart, at every Leader class in the first week of the program.

[Jason Janz]:
Yeah, I want them to know what they’re getting into and how this all started, and that this is not a government program. We’re there because we feel called to the work.

[Amy Hulst]:
I heard a rumor from other people that you used to offer money for people to leave the class. Do you still do that?

[Jason Janz]:
Yeah, I haven’t done that in a while, but yes, I used to offer money and say, if you want to leave, we’ll give you a hundred dollars to leave right now, because it’s best for us to know if you’re not serious, if you’re just here for a program versus wanting to undergo your own personal transformation.

[Amy Hulst]:
It’s very you to do that, to offer people money from the stage to leave the class.

[Jason Janz]:
I stopped doing it because somebody took me up on it, and it was so hard to fill classes back in the day. My gosh. So, yeah. If they stay, they’re going to get far more than a couple hundred bucks. Right? We’ll pay for all their tuition for any program they want to go into that we offer.

[Amy Hulst]:
Love it. Well, today we’re going to talk about poverty, which is a big topic and an important one, and one that the book is really addressing and tackling, especially in the first few chapters. It lays out a very compelling and staggering amount of information about poverty in America. We’re just going to chat about what poverty is, who it affects, and what it looks like.

[Jason Janz]:
Yeah, I’m excited, because although some people might think this is a dry and dusty topic, if we don’t actually understand what we’re talking about, we have the wrong pictures in our head and we apply the wrong solutions. Often when I speak about poverty, first of all, people think I’m simply talking about homelessness. Homelessness is less than two percent of the poverty population in this country, but it tends to get a lot of attention, a lot of media, a lot of funding. Nobody wants a tent outside in front of their business, so people engage with all the noise around that problem. But I actually think it’s an undue amount of attention, because the actual problem is fifty times that size. Anyone who lives below the federal poverty level is living in poverty.

So first of all, I want people to understand that poverty is actually defined in this country by a federal poverty guideline that anybody can Google. And we would say, in our organization, that anybody who makes less than two hundred percent of that number is living in poverty. I think it’s important for us to start out by saying this is actually what poverty is, but then also realizing that this isn’t just a problem. This is the number one problem in our country.

People might wonder how I can say that. Well, the United Nations has gotten together for decades. They have the Sustainable Development Goals for the planet. There are seventeen of them, and the number one goal for the entire planet is no poverty, in all of its forms, everywhere. That means America as well. People will always come to me and say, well, but the folks in India live on five dollars a day, or something like that. The general definition of poverty is if you don’t have enough money for food, clothing, and shelter for you and your family. And that’s different in every country. We have that in America as well. You cannot have food, clothing, and shelter as a single mom with two kids for less than fifteen thousand dollars a year. You just can’t do it in this country.

That’s poverty, regardless of what the numbers actually look like. So I think this is what we’re actually talking about here. And when you take the number of people in poverty, it’s pretty substantial how significant the problem is in our country.

[Amy Hulst]:
Thirty-five million households in America are living what we would call ALICE. That’s asset limited, income constrained, and employed. Why are we using a different metric? Where does ALICE come from, and why is it important?

[Jason Janz]:
So we have a group of people who live below the federal poverty guidelines, but then we have the ALICE population, often called the working poor. If you take those together, four out of ten Americans are living in some form of poverty in this country. That’s a really big problem.

[Amy Hulst]:
We have the official poverty measure, which you mentioned, and that was developed in the sixties out of the War on Poverty. So they came up with a measure that, at this point, I think almost everyone can agree is antiquated. It’s old, it doesn’t work. Then we created something called the supplemental line, and we also have ALICE. What I think is really interesting about all of that is that no one agrees, even on what it takes to make it. We’re using all these different lines to tell people whether they’re making it or not, and we’re actually using those lines to push some people out and keep some people in.

[Jason Janz]:
Yeah, I think when we have all these lines, we have the official poverty guidelines, then we have the supplemental poverty guidelines. MIT has now come out with a living wage calculator, which says, hey, we’re getting away from all the lines. It asks, what does it actually take to live? That one’s good because it balances geography. Lincoln, Nebraska has a different cost of living than Manhattan. MIT has done a really good job of factoring in family size, paying for child care, and all of that. So that’s probably, to me, the most accurate thing, because we’re not just looking to get people over a certain line. We want them to have a livable wage. Some people don’t even like that term, they use the word self-sufficiency instead.

I think some of the problems with the lines are also that we base all public aid off of these lines, and I get that we have to kind of do that. But one of the things that frustrates me is somebody will talk about a piece of legislation and say, if we do this and pass this, we’ll get five hundred thousand children out of poverty. What they’re essentially saying is that if we provided this much more aid, that family now moves above the line, but they may only move up above the line a couple hundred bucks. And now they’re actually more unseen, because they’re not available for benefits. That’s pretty frustrating to me, because for the person hearing that, it’s actually deceptive. People believe more is happening than is actually happening. And I get it, everyone’s trying to craft solutions they can show make a difference. It’s difficult.

So, summing that up, I like the MIT philosophy. Let’s move people toward a livable wage. Let’s do the best we can to define poverty. But I think all of us know that four out of ten Americans are struggling paycheck to paycheck to make it in this country. That is our number one problem, and let’s apply as much great thinking and action as we can to make that change.

[Amy Hulst]:
I don’t think anyone truly is debating whether a single mom with two kids, living in, we can even say, downtown Denver, a few blocks from where we’re recording this, is struggling. I don’t think anyone would really fight on that. I think a lot of the debate is about whose obligation it is to help her and her kids.

[Jason Janz]:
Yeah, I think we have some people who would take the bad choices model, saying people are in poverty because they made bad choices, and they’re going to blame the individual. Others are going to say they’re actually the products of a system, so they’re going to blame the system. There are some pockets in the culture that blame the rich, saying it’s actually the rich’s fault because they’re not paying enough taxes. That war is happening right now within the culture. I still want to believe in the goodness of the American citizen, that we would love our neighbor and say, regardless of how somebody got there, do we all agree that we want to see everybody flourish in our neighborhoods? Am I willing to take some responsibility, not just for my own circle of my own family and my own children, but for my neighbor as well? I think that’s the community I want to live in.

[Amy Hulst]:
What are we also getting wrong when we think about what you were saying earlier? Most often we think of poverty as a person on the side of the road with a cardboard sign, asking for a few dollars. What are we getting wrong in 2026 about that picture of poverty?

[Jason Janz]:
If we just think of poverty as hitting people of color, it doesn’t take into account how many children there are. Out of a hundred people in poverty, a good chunk of those are kids. People tend to care for their own, the people they culturally identify with, and if we just think it’s one ethnic group, we’re way underestimating the problem. Poverty is fairly agnostic about who it hits. It actually hits everybody, every group of people, every age group, every demographic. So our solutions need to mirror that. We’re all in this together as a country.

[Amy Hulst]:
Do you think poverty is a shared failure?

[Jason Janz]:
I think you’re going to find some people who will say, let’s blame the individual, this is the bad choices model of poverty. You’re going to have some people who say, let’s blame the system, the system is what causes the poverty. And you’re going to have some people, there are books out there saying it’s the fault of the rich, because they don’t pay enough taxes into the economy, that’s why we’re struggling. We could dive deeply into each of those narratives, but I do fundamentally believe that we should have a community where we have shared responsibility for shared human suffering. Let’s come together and live in a community where, if somebody struggles, we will actually help them get ahead. I think it’s going to take everybody.

[Amy Hulst]:
So we tease out a little bit at CrossPurpose that poverty isn’t just economic, even though you and I are having an economic discussion right now. And what we’ve talked about before is that you do need a number. At some point, you need a number to say this is when things should kick in, this is who needs the most vital help now. And it should also factor into the economics of the situation, someone’s wage and employment. Talk to me about the other things that flow into poverty.

[Jason Janz]:
We actually say that people aren’t just economic widgets who have to go get a job and produce. People have an inner self, a spiritual self. They have relational community as well. There’s poverty in all of those areas, and actually all of us have some form of poverty in our life. What drove my wife and me to make a change in our life was that we had a poverty of meaning. There was a spiritual poverty in our lives, and that drove us to move to where we did and to do the work we’re currently doing.

So while economics is kind of how we measure whether someone is in poverty or not, often what is most indicative of people actually exiting poverty, staying out of poverty, and moving to prosperity is working on the relational side of their life, the social capital or the spiritual capital, that inner self. Strengthening that will actually help produce lasting economic change.

[Amy Hulst]:
Going back to Matt Desmond’s Armchair Expert episode with Dax Shepard. He talks about how the poor are increasingly becoming more public, and the prosperous, or the wealthy, are increasingly becoming more private. That’s not only an economic issue, but I was even thinking about how we think about poverty relationally, in social capital terms. When you start to have that communal divide, and the relational divide between the two, you’re missing out on so much. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts on the lost Einsteins.

[Jason Janz]:
Let me first address this private versus public divide. It actually hurts both groups of people, because the more the poor are brought out into the public, the more stigmatization increases, since the media is usually driving that narrative, often unfairly. And the privatization of the wealthy just creates further distance, when actually, to solve the problem, we have to all come together. That’s bridging social capital, if I can talk like Putnam did in the 1980s in Bowling Alone. That’s really hard to build, but it’s really necessary.

Why do we want to do that? Raj Chetty has this theory around the lost Einsteins, that we need to help people get out of poverty because there’s an Einstein sitting in the third row of that underperforming school, and we’re missing out on that benefit to society. But sitting right next to the Einstein is the community health worker, the entrepreneur, the future leader in a community, the future office holder. Everyone’s valuable. Everyone has that potential. Talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not. So we should see the beauty in every single person. And it’s not just about becoming productive members of society, I think that’s even almost a harmful narrative. Everyone is a contributing member of society, and what society needs is to make a beautiful human fabric and tapestry. That’s what I want to see.

[Amy Hulst]:
A lot of times, poverty means we lose people earlier and earlier in their life than we should. There are statistics and studies showing that poverty is the fourth largest cause of death in America. It’s causing death to come earlier and quicker for our neighbor, or somebody we know, our uncle or aunt. It means we’re losing somebody, on average, about thirteen or fourteen years sooner than we should. We can talk economics, but if we even think about what we lose in people, family members not being able to be with us, people who are contributing to our communities, the lost Einsteins we are losing, I think that should also answer the question of who’s obligated to help. I think it’s all people.

[Jason Janz]:
I think that sometimes, when we think about poverty, we always think of economics, but we like to talk about it in terms of human suffering. Just think of the toxic stress of living in poverty. I asked several of our participants what poverty feels like to them. Some of them wrote this: poverty is when you have to choose between paying your housing bill or paying for your child with special needs to get the care they need. Poverty is sitting in a dark room, drinking yourself to death, and knowing that’s what you’re doing, but being too ashamed to stop. Another person wrote that poverty is living in your car with a cat, because your roommate spent your money on drugs. Poverty is not being able to afford necessities, food, clothing, and housing, and having peace of mind.

This is what produces that stress, which causes years to come off of our lives. We’re losing our neighbors because we are not coming together to help solve this problem.

[Amy Hulst]:
So Jason, you always say that we are hope dealers. Where do we find the hope to continue the work? Where can other people find the hope to continue?

[Jason Janz]:
I honestly get hope. This morning I spoke to two new classes, roughly a hundred students who are taking this journey to lead their own change out of poverty into prosperity. Dominic comes from a background of addiction, constantly sliding down the mountain, and he’s like, it is time for me to take control of my life. When he articulates his dream, he wants to drive truck and deliver exotic cars to people. His dream is to go to Miami one day, because he’s never been past Pueblo, Colorado.

Caitlin was on the front row. Caitlin struggles with autism and ADHD, and is entering the bookkeeping track, and just couldn’t articulate a dream beyond stability, like Maslow’s hierarchy in front of my eyes. But when you could get her into the space of thinking, what could life be if I could find some stability, she said she wants to give back and help people who’ve been in the struggle.

And another man stood up and said, hey, I’ve got a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, and I just want to be a father to them like I never had. And I’m like, that gives me hope every single day. I’m like, sure, we’ll try to raise money for a CDL scholarship for you. Because if you’re going to take care of those kids, nobody loves their kids like their parents do, right? No nonprofit, no agency, no school. It is those moms and dads. That gives me hope every single day.

[Amy Hulst]:
Thanks for listening to Jason and my conversation today on From Poverty to Prosperity. We look forward to continuing to unravel things like the social safety net and the benefits cliff. Please subscribe to this podcast and listen to us wherever you download podcasts and stream them.