Michelle Secler
While reading the rest of Abramsky’s “The American Way of
Poverty”, Abramsky discusses that communities could lower poverty by improving
the criminal justice system to decrease incarceration, creating a minimum
income for all American citizens, forming a state-backed system to loan money
to low-income communities, and providing an automatic savings account for
higher education for every person born in the US. Many of these solutions
seem unbelievable, but Abramsky points out in the reading that many counties,
cities and states already have related programs in place, and they have
functioned well for those countries. Of course, these solutions Abramsky
pointed out involve funding. The focus of Abramsky's funding plan is the renewal
of a financial transaction tax of 0.04% on all stock trades. The main problem,
according to Abramsky, is that Americans have lost a sense of the common good,
"a societal commitment to share the pain during hard times and a
willingness to think through the long-term consequences on one's community of
not so doing" (pg. 317). As our society continues to become more divided,
I was left questioning what it would take to make such a guarantee promising.
Potential Test Question: Abramsky stated that Social
Security and Medicare were designed to build our societies financial reserves,
but instead they ran dry. What could society of done better so that Social
Security and Medicare didn’t run dry?
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