1. On page 134, Abramsky uses the terms, "carrots and sticks". He says, "For those we deem the deserving poor, we provide carrots... For those we see as the undeserving poor, we use sticks." What he means by this is giving deserving poor tax breaks, suspensions of student loans, and mortgage loan modifications. For the undeserving poor, they would tie welfare payments to job searches, bar felons from public housing, etc. I thought this was shocking, because we shouldn't be categorizing poor people and we shouldn't be making it harder on them, then it already is. Everyone should be able to have the same chances and opportunities as everyone else.
2. On page 156, Abramsky says, "Hurricane Katrina is where old poverty meets new." What I interpreted from this was that New Orleans was already a city that was heavily populated by people in poverty. Once Hurricane Katrina hit, it made people who weren't in poverty lose their home, their things, and forced them into poverty. He points out that New Orleans hasn't figured out how to evacuate people in case of a natural disaster and how people were left to die in these natural disasters, because the city was so poor.
3. On page 166, Abramsky says, "For an increasing number of Americans, what the political leadership was just cottoning on to was something that they had been living in the shadow of for years." By this he means our economy and how it's been plummeting for decades. Political figures tell the public that it's not as bad as it seems and that we are alright. They lie to us and they don't tell us the full story on what's happening in our country. They do this in order to keep the peace to try and protect the public from the truth. They are afraid that once the public finds out the truth, that their will millions of questions that they can't answer or that there will be an uproar and they won't know how to handle it.
Good post. I agree that it seems our government has been plummeting for decades and all along the politicians are telling us its fine but then we get to the state we are in now and we can obviously tell that it is not. I do not understand and I try not to think about it much because it just makes me more and more upset. As you discussed in point #2, Hurricane Katrina did a lot of damage to an area that was all ready struggling financially. It is sad that in a matter of seconds and a bad storm, can wipe out thousands of people, their homes and their lives.
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