- There's a lot of ideas that have been circulating about why poverty exists and why we can't get on top of it as a nation.

Can you talk about what you think it is?

- There's so much poverty in this nation because many of us benefit from it.

And that's the cold hard truth of the matter, you know?

And I think that, there's this line by the novelist, Tommy Orange, that I quote in the book where he writes, you know, these kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths, and we think that the problem is that they're jumping.

- [Interviewer] Mm-hmm.

- And when I read that, I was like, "Man, that sounds like the poverty debate."

So many distractions.

So much attention on the poor themselves.

We should have been focusing on the fire, and who lit it, who's warming their hands by it.