Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Sasha Abramsky

Quote by Sasha Abramsky

“Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.”

Quote by Sasha Abramsky

Create image

Author

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

You May Also Like

“Ronald Reagan, and before him, Richard Nixon, and before Nixon, a slew of conservative politicians going back through American history, have played to the idea that the great majority of poor people are somehow "undeserving," and being undeserving, merit at best very limited, oftentimes deeply coercive and humiliating, government interventions to better their finances. That narrative isn't about to disappear overnight; but it strikes me as being like a weak gruel - there's no sustenance in it, no heft behind the argument.”

PeoplePoorPoliticianArgumentWeakConservativeDisappearFinanceAmerican HistoryPoor PeopleHumiliating
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“The failure of the first Barack Obama administration to really deliver on a new War on Poverty and a new language to explain these societal challenges in some ways provided the fuel that led to the Occupy Movement a few years later. And, while Occupy was a somewhat transitory phenomenon, many of the activist groups that emerged during this period are still out there, and still working on reshaping the political debate around taxes, around welfare, around government assistance to the poor, around debt relief for students, and so on.”

WarPoliticalLanguageChallengesPoorPovertyStudentsTaxesDebateBarackWelfarePhenomenonActivistWar On Poverty
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“Today there are a huge number of think tanks working on poverty-related issues; there are books written on the topic; and university centers being created to study poverty. But, at the same time, the media has a terribly hard time with this issue; it's very hard to convince editors and publishers to devote resources to complex investigations of the lives of America's poor. And, as a result, too often poverty is portrayed in stereotypes, in sound bites, in a few pat images rather than in its full Technicolor complexity and diversity.”

ThinkingBookTodayPoorPovertyStudyDiversityComplexityHard TimesConvinceStereotype
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“Too often the media assumes that "poverty" is an African American or a Latino issue. Of course, that's nonsense. While a higher percentage of the African American and Latino population does live in poverty as compared to the white population, when overall numbers are looked at, it is clear that people of all races, ethnicities, and colors, are represented amongst America's poor.”

PeoplePoorPovertyAssumingAfrican AmericanNonsenseLatino
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“The reliance on stereotypes is in part the result of a structural problem within the media. Most newspapers have a business beat, with a number of highly trained journalists who know how to cover companies, trading, the markets and so on. But almost none have labor reporters anymore, and to my knowledge, none have full-time poverty-beat correspondents. And all of this helps to render invisible the lives and the life stories of tens of millions of Americans.”

HelpingProblemLaborInvisibleJournalistStereotypeTradingRelianceLife Story
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“One of the most durable successes of the war on poverty was to dramatically reduce the number of elderly poor in America. That's still true today. But, by contrast, child poverty has shot up over the last few years: A decade ago, about 16 percent of children in America were poor - which is a shockingly high percentage. But it's not as shocking as today, when we see that 22 percent of kids live in poverty.”

ChildrenWarKidsTodayPoorPovertyContrastWar On Poverty
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“Despite all of the civil rights gains of the past several decades, when it comes to economic opportunity, African Americans and Latinos still experience far more unemployment than do whites and Asians, average wages are lower, and household wealth is lower. A smaller percentage of African Americans and Latinos attend, and complete, college, than is the case with whites and Asians, and a higher percentage end up in prison. All of these are indicators of massive disparities in opportunity, and these disparities are mirrored in poverty data.”

PastOpportunityWealthPovertyEconomicCollegePrisonCivil RightsAfrican AmericanLatino
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image

“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.”

RealCountryValuesTermTaxesCounty
Author:Sasha Abramsky
Create image