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The Profit of Our Poverty: How OBBB Revives an Old American Game

A Special Report by Kino Smith


Part I in a multi-part series on public poverty, private profit, and the economic extraction of Black America.


The Inheritance of a Broken Promise


There’s a special cruelty in a lie told so often it becomes tradition. In America, one such lie has been passed down through generations—engraved into legislation, whispered in campaign slogans, and broadcast through boardroom doors: that the state serves the people equitably.


For Black Americans, this lie has always been accompanied by a ledger. And like all ledgers, it speaks not in slogans, but in the finality of numbers.


With the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), we are witnessing not a new economic experiment, but the rebranding of a model that never went away: the systematic extraction of public wealth through the performance of aid. The faces are different. The fonts are more modern. But the machinery remains the same.




The Machine of Misery: How Poverty Becomes a Product


Let us begin with Medicaid. In 2023, the U.S. spent $880 billion on this program. To the public, that number suggests compassion. But beneath it lies a darker arithmetic. Nearly 70% of Medicaid dollars are not spent at public hospitals or community clinics, but funneled into private managed care corporations—companies like UnitedHealth Group, Centene, and Molina. UnitedHealth alone reported $22.4 billion in profits in 2023, the majority of it from administering benefits for the poor[^1].


This is not incidental. This is the design.


The same pattern repeats in food security. In 2023, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—known to most as EBT—disbursed $124 billion. The single largest beneficiary was not the family struggling to feed three children, but Walmart, which processed over $30 billion in SNAP purchases[^2]. That’s more than the GDP of 95 countries.


This is not a lifeline. This is vertical integration of poverty.


The numbers follow us into housing. Section 8, the federal housing voucher program, disbursed over $28 billion last year. Most tenants—disproportionately Black women with children—earn less than $16,000 annually[^3]. Yet they are required to pay 30–40% of their income in rent, with the rest guaranteed by the federal government. That guaranteed money—public funds—flows directly into the hands of landlords, 72% of whom are white[^4].


There is no mystery here. Poverty is not a failure of capitalism—it is a function of it.



OBBB: The End of the Illusion


The One Big Beautiful Bill is not the start of a new war. It is the quiet signing of a surrender.


"They call it One Big Beautiful Bill—


but it’s the same plantation ledger,


just digitized and disguised—


where Black and Brown poverty is the product,


and policy is the purchase order."


and policy is the purchase order."It slashes $95 billion from Medicaid over ten years[^7], tightening eligibility and reducing reimbursements—crippling clinics, especially those in Black communities where public insurance is the only coverage most patients have.


It freezes Section 8 voucher expansion, a move that sounds benign until you realize it means thousands of families now face rent increases without relief[^8]. Meanwhile, landlords—guaranteed payment under Section 8—see no similar sacrifice.

It eliminates federal subsidies for rural grocery stores, dooming dozens of markets that serve the Black Belt South and Native tribal lands[^9].


It defunds DEI-focused grants, cutting off support for Black-owned businesses, community CDFIs, and educational pipelines designed to repair the harms of redlining and racist banking[^10].


What we are witnessing is not austerity. It is economic ethnic cleansing by policy.



A System That Was Never Broken—Just Hidden


To say the system is broken is to give it too much grace. A broken thing once served a different purpose. But this system—this American political economy—was born to extract. Not to include. It was built off the commodification of Black and brown bodies—bodies once chained, then taxed, then pathologized, then surveilled, and now subsidized to generate profits they’ll never see.


From the earliest plantations, where the value of a person was measured by how much cotton they could pick per hour, to Jim Crow, which criminalized freedom into labor, to the Black Codes and peonage laws that turned emancipation into debt servitude—this has always been a structure of containment.


Reconstruction promised land. Jim Crow delivered cuffs.


Even as centuries passed, the blueprint held. The redlining maps of the 1930s—drawn not with guns but with government pens—became the quiet noose around Black neighborhoods. These maps didn't just deny mortgages; they devalued entire zip codes, making it impossible for Black families to build collateral, grow businesses, or pass down wealth. By the 1950s, we were baited into the cities for factory jobs—jobs that were later exported in waves of white industrial flight, leaving us with the skeleton of an economy and no real stake in the future.


When we tried to rebuild, they gave us programs like EB-5, supposedly designed to “revitalize” low-income areas. But what they really did was offer a green card for gentrification—allowing foreign investors to set up shop in our neighborhoods, using government incentives to hire their own, build for themselves, and extract wealth from a community they had no cultural or civic stake in.


Even Homestead Act exclusions locked our ancestors out of the very land ownership that created middle-class America. This absence of collateral—coupled with the devaluation of inner-city real estate—ensured that Black entrepreneurs would forever be deemed “high-risk” by banks, even as we watched others take the very loans denied to us.


The machine didn’t stop. It just got cleaner. It replaced overseers with algorithms. It replaced cotton with Medicaid billing. It replaced chains with credit scores and enslaved us in spreadsheets, balancing federal budgets on the backs of our poverty.

And now, with OBBB, it has decided that even the illusion of help is no longer required.

This is not a new failure. It is the final revelation of an old one. A system never broken—just hidden behind policy and profit margins.


"Gentrification isn't an accident. It's a blueprint—with us on the eviction side of the line."



The City is the New Plantation, Modernized


What was once enforced by whip and overseer is now maintained by subsidy and software.

  • The tenant is bound to pay the rent.

  • The worker is tethered to low wages.

  • The patient is confined by Medicaid eligibility.

  • The business is trapped in dependency on public dollars it does not control.


It's the sharecropping model updated for the digital age. But instead of cotton, the crop is poverty itself.




What Comes Next: Building Outside the System


If we are to survive, we must create a counter-narrative with a new ledger.


We must become the architects of our own infrastructure—not merely consumers of the one weaponized against us.

  • Invest in Black-controlled land trusts and clinics that redirect public dollars back into the communities where they’re most needed.

  • Develop EBT-eligible, community-owned grocery stores that hire locally, grow locally, and profit locally.

  • Build modern Black rural communities—similar in spirit to Amish settlements—that embrace faith, cooperation, and technology without dependence on extractive outside systems.

  • Use digital infrastructure to scale a simple but powerful idea: economic self-determination by design.


This is the foundation of Spending With Purpose—an AI-enhanced, neighborhood-based economic model that analyzes where community dollars go and reroutes those expenditures through a local loop. It’s not about spending more. It’s about spending differently.


Here's how it works:

  • Track your top 50 daily spending categories—from groceries to gas to services.

  • Identify Black-, Latinx-, and community-owned vendors in each sector within a defined ZIP code or county.

  • Build digital cooperative purchasing agreements so families, nonprofits, and businesses can unlock group discounts or co-own parts of the supply chain.

  • Incentivize loyalty to local providers by offering return rewards, volunteer credits, or even governance votes in the local ecosystem.


Over time, this creates a self-healing economy. One where public dollars—whether from Medicaid, EBT, or even school budgets—don’t vanish the moment they’re spent. Instead, they multiply, creating jobs, ownership, and generational assets inside the very ZIP codes that have been drained for decades.


This isn’t just about strategy. It’s about salvation. It is how we leave the plantation behind—once and for all.


Verified Source Index

Section 8 Housing


SNAP & Retail

Healthcare

Wealth & Ownership

Policy Impact


 
 
 

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