The Coronavirus Will Be a Catastrophe for the Poor
This pandemic will be especially punishing for low-income workers, just as they were starting to reverse a generation of widening inequality.
When the 1918 influenza pandemic ripped through the United States, inequality took its revenge.
In the decade just before the outbreak, Progressives had worked tirelessly to narrow the gap between rich and poor that had blown wide open in the Gilded Age. They took on monopoly power with the Federal Trade Commission, ratified a federal income-tax amendment, and gave federal workers a form of disability insurance. But in a rebuke to Progressive victories, the influenza caused a regressive pandemic. Its first wave the poor, who worked in closer quarters and lived
