I just participated in United We Sleep to End Hunger and Homelessness, an effort of the United Way of Nashua to raise awareness of hunger and homeless in our community. In Nashua, as in many other cities throughout our nation, food and shelter have become expensive commodities, and a growing number of people cannot afford them.

A highlight of the event, apart from sleeping in a box on the lawn of Nashua Community College during a storm, was learning what people are doing to ameliorate hunger and homelessness. Among other services, they are providing emergency housing, job training, lessons in financial management, counseling in response to substance abuse and family stress, and strategies to make housing more affordable.

These efforts are impressive; many people are benefitting from them. However, we must ask whether they are doing much more than helping people cope with an economy that is becoming incapable of preventing people from falling through the cracks of our society.

The growing number of hunger and homeless people in our community affirms that our economic structures have become incapable of serving our poorest neighbors. Donald Trump boasted that our unemployment rate is lower than it has been for 50 years, but he failed to acknowledge that the earnings of working-class people, adjusted for inflation, are lower than they have been in 50 years. Their incomes are declining while prices are rising, eliminating people from the housing market, if not the market for a healthy diet.

During the evening, I heard a lot of noise about the need for minimum wages to become livable wages. One argument was that wages ranging from $15.00 to $25.00 per hour are necessary for people to make a viable living in our economy.

The idea of a living wage sounds good, but it will not happen without radically restructuring our economy; an hourly wage of $20.00 would require the current minimum wage of $7.25 to increase by 175 percent, an increase that will create inflation and unemployment. Legislating it will not be viable for a long time.

Therefore, our society needs to consider how we can make prevailing wages more livable. One option is for our governments, whether state or federal, to fund services that empower the poor, like childcare and health insurance. These services are among the highest expenses of low-income people, especially single parents. However, our political leaders are more concerned with legislating tax cuts for the wealthy, presumably because they want to believe that the benefits of tax cuts will trickle from the wealthy to the poorest people in our society.

The idea of money, or any economic value, trickling from the rich to the poor has had about 35 years to prove its validity, but it has only widened the gap between the rich and the poor, creating a dual economy in our society. The rich and the poor live in different economic realities, and money does not trickle from one reality to the other; instead, it flows from the poor to the rich through escalating living expenses, especially housing, childcare and medical costs.

The time has come to restructure our economy by lobbying our state and federal governments to fund services that benefit the poor, especially healthcare and childcare. This can be done by repealing tax cuts, if not also by raising taxes on the higher incomes, and it will liberate them from the economic burdens that are enslaving them, and empower them to purchase food, shelter and other services that are essential to their well-being.

Now, anyone reading this might think: That is crazy; our government wants to get out of the healthcare industry and it has no interest in paying for childcare. However, the children and grandchildren of the current middle-class, which has been eroding for a generation, will inherit a staggering national debt, and the current tax cuts will increase it by $1.4 million. This debt will widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and make the poor more vulnerable to being eliminated from the housing market, if not the markets for labor, healthcare, childcare and nutrition. We need to act now for the sake of current and future generations.

If we are losing our faith in the moral capacities of our governments to serve the poor in contrast to catering the rich, we have an alternative. What do we think about donating the benefits of our tax cuts to organizations that are making effective efforts to relieve the economic burdens of the poor?

The benefits from tax cuts are morally dubious: they become more unnecessary as they get larger, providing the greatest benefit to the people who have the lowest need. Contrastingly, they provide the least benefit to the people who have the greatest need.

If the governments do not have the moral capacity to serve its poorest residents, our citizens must fill the void. A trickle, even if it worked, is not sufficient to prevent the poor from falling through the cracks of our society. The benefits of our economy must flow to them.

Sleeping in a box is fun, but only for people who don’t have to. Please consider donating the benefits from your tax cut to the charity of your choice.

Bruce Bradshaw is an occasional columnist for The Telegraph.

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