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.

Things get shabby. Paint peels off the house. The car gets older and older and you keep fixing it because newer cars are too expensive. Your towels and sheets wear thin. Anyone can look at your clothes and know you have no money.

You eat more fats and sugars because meats, fresh fruits and vegetables cost too much, and chips and cookies are cheap and filling. You gain weight. Joining a gym is not an option. You get depressed. Maybe you drink. Beer is cheap and filling.

You buy things in small quantities, even though large quantities are a better value. You can’t afford to save money on the “economy size.” If you were saving for retirement or a rainy day, you realize it’s a rainy day and you spend your savings.

You learn to say no to your kids. A lot. No to ice cream on hot days. No to the sneakers all the other kids wear. No to birthday parties, karate lessons, soccer lessons, music lessons — but in the days of pandemic, at least the kids know all their friends are in the same boat.

You gradually lose touch with your richer friends and the more upscale members of your family. People think poverty is catching. People are afraid yours will rub off on them. You feel ashamed and needy; you feel anxious and guilty; you wonder where you went wrong.

All these things are happening to millions of Americans right now. Mostly, we blame ourselves for our financial problems. We are taught that America is a land of opportunity, so if we’re poor it must be our own fault. We must not be trying hard enough, or we’re stupid.

But poor people, in my experience, are exactly like rich people, except they have no money. Their poverty is most often not due to any defect in themselves; the cause is a system that allows workers to be underpaid, given no job security, and offered few benefits. The rich people who control both parties have deliberately undermined unions, which used to be our best means of leveling the playing field. Now everybody is on their own, playing on a field that keeps tilting so all the money slides to the rich.

In this system, it’s quite clear by now, the rich keep getting richer, and the divide between the rich and everybody else keeps getting wider. Safety nets have been quietly shredded for the last 40 years, so if you get in trouble you tend to stay in trouble. An accident, an illness, a job loss, or a divorce can make the bottom fall out of your life. And now the virus has pulled the rug out from under most of our lives.

This country used to try to take care of all its citizens. Then the doctrine of greed took hold, around the time Reagan took office. Gradually we have gotten crueler and crueler to poor people. The media ignores them. Government pretends that charities will make sure nobody starves or sleeps on the street. And most of us have tried to forget that poverty is only one misfortune away from claiming our lives too.

Now poverty will be the new normal. The newly poor will need government to do what it needs to do, which is guarantee minimum income that will keep all of us going until a new economy gears up. Our current federal government does not care how many of us die in the meantime. We’ll see in January how hard our new government is willing to fight for the survival of ordinary Americans.