My friend Jeremy lent me his copy of Thom Hartmann’s The Crash of 2016 (N.Y.: Hachette Book Group, 2013) and ordered me to read it. The book details how extreme conservatives in this country with the help of Fox News, the U.S. Supreme Court, and billionaires like the Koch Brothers are ending the democracy of which we were once so proud.
The book contains one of the best dramatizations of income inequality I’ve seen:
Imagine walking into a classroom of kindergarteners and finding that just one kid is in possession of nearly all the toys. Just one kid has thousands of toy cars, army men, and building blocks piled up like Scrooge’s money bin, filling half the classroom; one or two of the kids have a dozen or so toys; and the rest of the class of kids have to share just one dinky, old rag doll. No one could possibly think that’s a healthy way of distributing toys to a kindergarten class. That one kid couldn’t even play with all his toys.
Would we call that kid a toy creator? Would we tell all the other kindergarteners that they can only play with toys when that one student decides to share them?
Of course not. Yet that’s exactly what we do with billionaires in our economy.
I think you will enjoy reading this book. It is great and best of all, it's non fiction.
ReplyDeleteI do hope that more people read it. It is both an analysis and a call to arms.
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