Throughout the book so far, I have
come to realize that this is a bit of history about poverty. It tells the
political side of poverty. Ambramsky has
used people’s stories that he has encountered to give us an idea of what
poverty is like. What is being done or rather not being done. Some evidence
used to back up his findings includes information from the Census Bureau. On
page 51, Ambramsky wrote, “There is, after all, a reason Swedes…tolerate far
higher taxes than Americans do.” Ambramsky clearly stated that the Swedes get
treated better than the Americans do. They get their money’s worth from their
taxes. There have been a few stories told in the book so far that are just so
sad. Like the one where they were about to get medical insurance but something
came up right before they received it and they went into debt because they did
not have medical insurance at the time of the incident. Also, on page 44, Ambramsky wrote, “In other
words, to assume the worst of applicants, to have as a bureaucratic default
position the belief that all applicants would cheat the system if they could,
rather than that most were simply people who were mired in hard times and
needed assistance to survive from one day or one week to the next.” Ambramsky
wrote this talking about the “welfare queens” of the Reagan era. I thought that
it was an interesting way to describe people on welfare. So far this book has
been a bit eye opening. It definitely has a lot of information to share.
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