Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Anne Kim. She is a lawyer and public policy expert who serves as contributing editor at the Washington Monthly.

She is the author of the books abandoned, America's Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection,

and most recently Poverty for Profit, How Corporations Get Rich of America's poor.

And Kim, thank you so much for joining us

on current affairs today.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I suppose the first question here is how is it possible

to make a profit from poverty?

Poor people don't have much money. That's sort of the nature of being in poverty.

So how is there money to be made off of the poor? Sure. Well, the government has money and the federal

government spends, the federal government spends at least $900 billion a year. That's an underestimate, actually, on programs for the poor.

And over the last 40 to 50 years, there has been a steady privatization of social services,

so that is government money that is going to private corporations to deliver social services.

And then there is a lot of profit

taking from poor people themselves in a form of skimming off the benefits that a low-income

Americans receive from the federal government. Yeah, I think this is what's, your book kind of

surprised me because the first thing, when I thought I understood profiting off of poverty,

my first thought was just pure private

industry like payday lending.

But then you point out that actually we don't really think correctly about the way that

anti-poverty programs work.

There's this idea.

...