373 Mind-Boggling Facts and Questions from the Puzzle Vault by Nayden Kostov - book review

 

BOOK REVIEW

373 Mind-Boggling Facts and Questions from the Puzzle Vault by Trivia and Quizzes by Nayden Kostov

Entertaining, thought provoking and informative. A collection of often overlooked truisms that are sure to expand your knowledge base.

EXCERPTS;

President Johnson admitted as much in 1965, telling Congress that the actions of Black Americans who had joined the civil rights movement “called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for [their] persistent bravery, and [their] faith in American democracy?”

When Johnson uttered these words, Congress was polarized; the Democratic Party was coming apart at the seams; and the country, by denying Black citizens access to the ballot box, was undemocratic in fact.

In other words, the Washington that passed transformational legislation outlawing racial discrimination, expanding access to healthcare, food, and education, and slashing the poverty rate was just as broken as the Washington of today. Ordinary Americans still found a way to win, as we now must. Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so. And today, such a movement

American labor is once again on the move, growing more boisterous and feistier by the day, organizing workplaces once thought untouchable. A renewed movement for housing justice is gaining steam. In a resurgence of tenant power, renters have formed eviction blockades and chained themselves to the entrances of housing court, meeting the violence of displacement with a force of their own. The Poor People’s Campaign has elevated the voices of low-income Americans around the country, voices challenging “the lie of scarcity in the midst of abundance” and mobilizing for things like educational equity and a reinvestment in public housing.[

They march under different banners—workers’ unions and tenants’ unions; movements for racial justice and economic justice—but they share a commitment to ending poverty in America.

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Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond - Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

It is past time to wake up America!

The Europeans refer to America as the land of the working poor where there are over 800,000 homeless.

This book is a reality check. It has been said that the Americans can be sold anything, even a war.

EXCERPTS:

I have met poor Americans around the country striving for dignity and justice—or just plain survival, which can be hard enough: home health aides in New Jersey who belonged to the full-time working homeless, fast food workers in California fighting for a living wage, and undocumented immigrants in Minneapolis organizing for affordable housing, communicating with their neighbors through the Google Translate app. This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela.

Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty. There are more than 38 million.

Instead, we let the rich slide and give the most to those who have plenty already, creating a welfare state that heavily favors the upper class. And then our elected officials have the audacity—the shamelessness, really—to fabricate stories about poor people’s dependency on government aid and shoot down proposals to reduce poverty because they would cost too much. Glancing at the price tag of some program that would cut child poverty in half or give all Americans access to a doctor, they suck their teeth and ask, “But how can we afford it?” How can we afford it? What a sinful question. What a selfish, dishonest question, one asked as if the answer wasn’t staring us straight in the face. We could afford it if we allowed the IRS to do its job. We could afford it if the well-off among us took less from the government. We could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes.

Americans throw away more than that amount in food every year.

What could $177 billion buy? Quite a lot. We could ensure that every person in America had a safer and more affordable place to live. Every single one of us. We could put a real dent in ending homelessness in America, and we could end hunger.

Companies are doing all they can to avoid paying what they owe. Wealthy families, too, have found new ways to weasel out of paying taxes. Studies have shown that most Americans pay 90 percent of the taxes they owe, but the ultra-rich pay only 75 percent. This is possible because affluent have increasingly come to rely on a burgeoning industry of tax professionals who have devised ingenious ways to get around investing in the common welfare.

When corporations hide profits in tax havens, and when rich families stash valuable assets in offshore accounts, they defraud the American public, forcing everyone else to pay for their greed.

“It seems to me that people who earn nothing and contribute nothing get everything for free. And the people who work hard and struggle for every penny barely end up surviving.” Universal programs, like a universal basic income (UBI), get rid of this baggage. Designed to benefit a large number of people, sometimes irrespective of their standing, universal programs are less polarizing and so are considered more politically durable.

I’m not calling for “redistribution.” I’m calling for the rich to pay their taxes. I’m calling for a re-balancing of our social safety net. I’m calling for a return to a time when America made bigger investments in the general welfare. I’m calling for more poor aid and less rich aid.

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