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Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Book by Nicholas D. Kristof · 10 quotes · Birth Control, Child Poverty, Poverty

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Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope Quotes

“Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

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“Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.”

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“The gains in wealth and income have gone largely to a tiny share of the population, as is common knowledge by now. The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades.”

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“As a society, we denounce "delinquents," "hoodlums" and "hooligans," but the truth is that we routinely fail troubled kids before they fail us. More children die each year in the United States from abuse and neglect than from cancer. For every child who dies, thousands are injured, raped or brutally abused. We shrug as millions of children undergo trauma in ways that harm them and unravel our social fabric--and then we blame the kids when things go wrong.”

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“America ranks number 41 in child mortality, according to the Social Progress Index, which is based on research by three Nobel Prize–winning economists and covers 146 countries for which there is reliable data. We rank number 46 in internet access, number 44 in access to clean drinking water, number 57 in personal safety and number 30 in high-school enrollment.”

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“Blacks routinely get the worst of it in the judicial process, particularly when they are poor... The United States sentencing commission found that blacks get sentences 19% longer than whites do, for the same offense, even after controlling for criminal history and other variables. The darker an African-American's complexion, the longer the sentence, researchers found. Blacks are also more likely to be found guilty and be sentenced to death.”

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“Astonishingly, the share of students who don't get education in contraceptives is going up, not down. The Trump administration even tried to cut off funding for a teen pregnancy prevention program (lawsuits forced it to continue that funding). What's confounding is that these same officials are often anti-abortion, yet they don't seem to understand that preventing unplanned pregnancies will reduce abortions. They believe that condoms will promote promiscuity, when condoms no more cause sex than umbrellas cause rain. These same officials then thunder about the irresponsibility of girls who get pregnant, oblivious to their own irresponsibility.”

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“Something about reproductive health makes politicians and local officials lose their reasoning faculties. State education officials and local school board members know that teen pregnancy is a huge problem, yet they often refuse to allow teaching to avoid it. Just eighteen states require schools to reach birth control, and only about half of American kids receive any classroom instruction in contraception before the first time they have sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute.”

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