A clearly articulated, maddening case study in how the rich get richer on the backs of the poor.
Want to expand a fortune? All it takes is a congressperson or two in the pocket, as this vivid account of gaming the political system amply demonstrates.
Brookings Institution economist Wessel opens with a 2013 dinner at an expensive D.C. restaurant in which a current Biden economic adviser and one from the previous administration broke bread with Sean Parker, the fallen but shameless founder of Napster and ousted first president of Facebook. Parker had two passions: to cure cancer and end poverty by making it possible for “very rich people to invest in left-behind parts of the country in exchange for a generous tax break.” Everyone Parker met warned him off trying to translate such a project into law—but, against the odds, he pulled it off by bagging politicos who passed a law in 2017 that created 8,764 “opportunity zones.” These allowed wealthy people to invest capital gains in poor census tracts and thereby lessen or eliminate their tax burden. Of course, in the Trump era, there was no oversight, and thus money went into projects that benefited the rich and areas that didn’t need economic spurring, such as rapidly gentrifying sections of the Bay Area and a Nevada industrial park that housed a Tesla plant. (One investor in the latter was Michael Milken, his name a byword for fraud, who was quite open in admitting that “he was buying land to take advantage of the tax break.”) Meanwhile, places where such tax breaks would have worked to the benefit of poor neighborhoods, such as Baltimore and Detroit, went underfunded even as the regulations got “consistently more taxpayer friendly.” Wessel allows that some investments did go to their intended targets, though most did not. Even so, opportunity zones are so popular that they’re unlikely to go away, since “once launched, government programs and tax breaks tend to persist.”
A clearly articulated, maddening case study in how the rich get richer on the backs of the poor.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5719-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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