Matthew Desmond says U.S. should take ‘hard look’ at tax breaks in poverty fight

Americans benefiting from a “lopsided welfare state” should be more critical of tax breaks and policy structures that potentially add to their wealth at the expense of others, the leading U.S. poverty researcher Matthew Desmond urged Wednesday during an event at the Urban Institute.

“Many of us on the left and the right and in the center, we’ve been pretty comfortable with absolving theories of the problem — as if there’s all these tens of millions of people that don’t have enough to make basic necessities, and it’s nobody’s…