David > Recent Status Updates

Quite the story of Maggot's mom and how she ended up in prison .

End ch. 1, "The kind of problem poverty is."

Now Bates has been murdered in the operating room, late at night, with a scalpel left in her chest.

And...we just saw the victim die on the table, as anaesthetic was being administered.

Still getting context, if the hospital ward and its staff, and the incessant bombing and shooting going on outside its walls, and some of the relationships between staff and patients who are regularly brought in.

In the chapter "tear down the walls" the author makes the case for ending poverty in America. Stats about how our government expenses and revenues are quite far below this of comparably rich nations. The kinds of benefits in overall safety and mobility we could see. And some of the potential pains we might have to experience during such a significant transition.

In the chapter "empower the poor" are many examples of how control has been wrested from the poor, eg by making it more costly for living because many low-cost homes are bought by landlords and rented to the poor at prices higher than the (monthly) cost of purchasing, how birth control is often beyond their means, etc.

Hard to summarize all the arguments, but one theme is that those of us who are not poor benefit in various ways from the poor, through low prices possible because of low wages, or high property values made that way by excluding the poor. "Private opulence, public squalor" is one of his descriptions that seems to fit.

Lots of debunking "conventional wisdom," such as that raising wages would lead to higher unemployment. The argument for this seems logical, since the money previously paid for wages wouldn't hire as many people, but the reality is that companies hire just as many people and just pay them more.

Shooting has commenced. The actor picked to be the main male character turned out to be a nitwit, so he's been fired, causing a lot of schedule revamping to be needed, "stat," as some of the assistants excessively demand.