The poverty I know from the inside is working-class American poverty. Billions of people around the world are suffering from much worse forms of poverty, but I’m thankful that has not been my experience. American poverty is bad enough.

American poverty means never being able to pay all the bills. You rob Peter to pay Paul: you pay the electric bill this month, the water bill next month. You agree to pay the dentist $20 a month forever. The cost of everything goes up: food, rent, health care, gas. Your income stays the same.

Maybe you take a second job, leaving your ten-year-old to take care of the six-year-old after school. You sell your guitar and your great-grandmother’s necklace. Maybe you move to a smaller, cheaper place further from town, although it means even less time with your kids and more money for transportation.

You stay awake at night worrying about money. You are anxious all the time, and your frustration affects your relationships. It’s hard not to take things out on your partner or your kids. You have no energy for your friends or for taking care of yourself. The stress is nonstop.

And now, with the pandemic, you might have lost your job, or your second job. Or you’re in one of those essential job categories and have to keep working even though you’re afraid it endangers your family.

The American myth is that in this country, all you have to do to get by is work 40 hours a week. If you play by the rules, you will rise up in your field over time, and before long you’ll be doing fine. This has not actually been true since the 1970s.

The truth is that only the rich do better over time. In the past four decades, most of the income growth has gone to the top 10 percent. In the decade plus since the last recession, nearly all the growth has gone to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, the median wage (half earn more, half earn less) for an individual is about $27,000. That’s about half of what a household needs to survive, at least in most cities where there are actually jobs.

Since Reagan began the deliberate destruction of unions, workers have been putting in more hours for less money. We have lost the ground gained by the labor movement almost a century ago: the average American work week is now 50 hours, not 40, and many salaried workers routinely put in 60 hours a week just to keep their jobs, for no extra pay.

Corporations have figured out that it’s cheaper to pay slave wages overseas than to give Americans decent wages. It’s cheaper still to replace humans with robots. Unless we make some radical changes to economic policy, more and more Americans will find themselves desperately seeking even the lowest wage jobs, and struggling to keep their families fed and housed.

These days, due to wildfires, hurricanes, and now the pandemic, millions of Americans are finding themselves newly poor. Chances are that most of them will stay poor for a long time.

It’s easy to fall into poverty. You lose your job, or your house, or you get sick, or you have to take care of a family member, and boom, you’re poor. Unless you have rich and generous relatives, or you’re otherwise well connected to rich people who can help you get back up, once you are down you’ll most likely stay down. The system is designed to keep you there.

If you are stuck in poverty, try not to blame yourself. America is being run for the benefit of the wealthy, and the more who are living in poverty, the easier it is for the rich. There’s so much competition for jobs that they can keep wages ridiculously low. This is a social problem, not a psychological problem. You are not lazy or shiftless or stupid. It is our society that needs to change. What you need to do, with any time and energy you can scrape together, is join forces with the millions of others who are trapped by working class poverty, and fight to make that change happen.