An angry attack on Washington and the wealthy, asserting that their alliance has distorted the economy, shrunk the middle class and enriched the already rich.
Competing polemics rely on predictions of a dire future, but veteran investigative reporters Barlett and Steele point out that they delivered identical warnings in America: What Went Wrong (1992)—all of which came true. They maintain that the deficit is less the result of government programs than plummeting tax revenue from the rich, who paid 51.2 percent of their income in 1955 versus 16.6 percent today. Congress once assumed that salaried workers shouldn’t pay more than the rich, who lived on dividends. They reversed this in 2003, capping the dividend rate at 15 percent. More than half of large American corporations pay no tax. Since the 1970s, advocates of deregulation and free trade persistently proclaim that it increases jobs and reduces the trade deficit, apparently unaware that the exact opposite almost always happens. The authors’ solutions include: Revise the tax code so corporations and the rich pay more than the middle class instead of less, discard the clueless ideology of free trade (no other nation believes it), re-regulate disastrously unregulated areas, and enforce current laws equally instead of giving the influential a free pass. The authors describe genuine problems, but their solutions would produce outrage among congressional Republicans (obscenities such as “tax increase,” “government regulation,” “protectionism” and “class warfare” would fill the air) and no enthusiasm from Democrats. Reforms since the 2008 crash have been easily defeated or watered down.
Readers must cling to the hope that things are not as bad as the authors claim.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58648-969-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Did you like this book?
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
