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This interview is a special KGNU pre-publication interview (the book comes out in February 2021 from The authors, Joanne Samuel Goldblum, (@jgoldblum), founder of the National Diaper Bank Network, and journalist Colleen Shaddox who argue that the systems that should protect our citizens are broken and that poverty results from flawed policies\u2014compounded by racism, sexism, and other ills\u2014rather than people\u2019s \u201cbad choices.\u201d Federal programs for the poor often fall far short of their aims: The U.S. has only 36 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income families; roughly 1 in 3 households on Navajo reservations lack plumbing; and inadequate counsel by public defenders can lead to harsher penalties for crimes or time in \u201cdebtors\u2019 prisons\u201d for those unable to pay fines or court fees. An overarching problem is that the U.S. determines eligibility for government benefits with an outdated and \u201cirrationally low\u201d federal poverty level of $21,720 for a family of three, which doesn\u2019t take into account necessities such as child care when women work outside the home. The authors credibly assert that it makes more sense to define poverty as an inability to afford basic needs in seven areas\u2014\u201cwater, food, housing, energy, transportation, hygiene, and health\u201d\u2014each of which gets a chapter that draws on academic or other studies and interviews with people like a Baltimore resident who had to flush his toilet with bottled water after the city shut it off due to an unpaid bill. This plainspoken primer in the spirit of recent books like Anne Kim\u2019s Abandoned\xa0and Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn\u2019s\xa0Tightrope, Goldblum and Shaddox interweave macro analyses with examples of micro interventions that might work in any community. A Head Start teacher in Lytle, Texas, says her program saw benefits just from giving toothbrushes (and a chance to use them at a classroom sink) to children who had none at home: \u201cThey come here, and they scrub like there\u2019s no tomorrow.\u201d