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Quote by Sasha Abramsky

“Big cities like New York are thriving, economically, culturally, in terms of real estate values, and by a slew of other measures. Yet, at the same time, much of the country has been utterly hollowed out. In California, where I live, affluent coastal cities such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley hubs have lower than national average unemployment, higher wages, higher tax bases. Meanwhile, there are inland counties in California where there's still nearly 20 percent unemployment.”

Quote by Sasha Abramsky

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Sasha Abramsky

Sasha Abramsky is an active contemporary writer and critic, known for his insightful social commentary and critical thinking. His work covers a wide range of topics, including political, economic, and social issues. more

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“We're living through an era of higher income inequality than the country has experienced since before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, most people are running in place, and those in the bottom quintile of the economy are being swept backward year in and year out. A worker with a high school education today is likely to earn less in real terms than did their parents and grandparents in the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, while overall life expectancy is increasing in America, for those with low levels of education it's actually declining.”

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Author:Sasha Abramsky
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“To really tackle poverty, politicians, activists, academics will all have to think outside their boxes, will have to start developing much more integrated approaches to these problems. And a large part of this will involve working out ways to push for living wages. Partly this will involve re-empowering the union movement, which has been massively weakened in recent decades. Partly it will involve a willingness to restructure tax codes to penalize companies that don't provide basic benefits and decent wages to employees.”

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“Detroit is a fascinating place, because things are so bad there that the dystopia has almost become utopian. People know they can't rely on the state, that public infrastructure is broken, and they've taken their own measures. People are growing their own food and selling their produce to local stores and restaurants. It's certainly not a fix-all; Detroit's problems are too deep-rooted for quick-fix solutions. But it's a hopeful sign. Detroiters are crafting their own solutions rather than being passive in the face of the city's and state's actions and inactions.”

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Author:Sasha Abramsky
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“The poverty we see in America is now too widespread, and too complex, for easy fixes. But I do think we can reimagine many of our institutions and can create new ones in ways that would be effective. We could, for example, create social insurance systems, similar to social security, such as that we went through in 2008-9. We could create a financial transaction tax, oil profit taxes and a fairer estate tax system, and we could plow much of the revenue raised from these into job training programs, into better education infrastructure, into an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.”

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“I argue that in the long run, the US would be on a far more financially secure footing if we recalibrate how we spend about two-to-three percent of the country's GNP, using state and federal taxes to create pools of money for spending on America's poor - which would, as numerous economists have argued in recent years, create virtuous spending circles, since those on lower incomes spend more of each extra dollar in their possession than do those on higher incomes.”

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Author:Sasha Abramsky
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“I recognize that individuals and organizations with tremendous financial clout and open access to the political system in the post-Citizens United era, are going to fight tooth and nail against a reinvigorated War on Poverty. But I also think that the elections of 2012 showed the limits of big money in politics, and the willingness of a majority of voters to really think these issues through for themselves.”

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“I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.”

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