A well-reasoned argument that, given the arrival of a like-minded administration, may soon prove to have legs.
A book from the Patriotic Millionaires group demands that wealthy Americans contribute vastly more to the public treasury.
Pearl, Payne, and their fellow philanthropic millionaires have a dire warning for the ultrawealthy: “You cannot continue to sit by and enjoy your riches while the rest of the world falls further into poverty and chaos….Reread your history books. Dysfunctional societies don’t end well for rich people either.” Though being rich is a fine thing—“I would recommend it to anyone,” Pearl breezily notes—it carries certain responsibilities as well as considerable freedoms. An equitable tax code is a start. The current system was built for the rich and by the rich, and it is structured so that it actively militates against building a strong middle class, predicated on fictions such as the trickle-down theory of economics. Inequality is rampant, and with it, instability and strife grow. This is all by design, write the authors. Against it, they talk economics. By reason of the theory of marginal utility, which holds that a person who has lots of units of something—dollars, say—will value an added unit less than a person who has few of them, those who have more money than they know what to do with will scarcely register a tax hike. Doing away with carried-interest deductions, putting capital gains rates on par with the rates applied to earned income, and taxing inheritances will do their part, too. The authors note that the current tax mess can’t be laid only at the door of Republicans, and they charge that it’s up to the people to rise up not violently but politically by voting for those who will advance a more equitable system: “If the American people are paying attention…they can have the kind of tax code they want, regardless of who’s in charge.”
A well-reasoned argument that, given the arrival of a like-minded administration, may soon prove to have legs.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62097-626-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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