A “remarkable” look at the flaws of the social safety net through one family’s personal tragedy and the Catch-22 financial disaster that followed (Deborah A. Stone, author of Policy Paradox). When Andrea Louise Campbell’s sister-in-law, Marcella Wagner, was run off the freeway by a hit-and-run driver, she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant. She survived—and, miraculously, the baby was born healthy. But that’s where the good news ends. Marcella was left paralyzed from the chest down. This accident was much more than just a physical and emotional tragedy. Like so many Americans, neither Marcella nor her husband, Dave, who worked for a small business, had health insurance. On the day of the accident, she was on her way to class for the nursing program through which she hoped to secure one of the few remaining jobs in the area with the promise of employer-provided insurance. Instead, the accident plunged the young family into the tangled web of means-tested social assistance. As a social policy scholar, Campbell thought she knew a lot about means-tested assistance programs. What she quickly learned was that missing from most government manuals and scholarly analyses was an understanding of how these programs actually affect the lives of the people who depend on them. Using Marcella and Dave’s situation as a case in point, she reveals the programs’ shortcomings in this book. Because American safety net programs are designed for the poor, the couple first had to spend down their assets and drop their income to near-poverty level before qualifying for help. What’s more, to remain eligible, they’ll have to stay under these strictures for the rest of their lives, barred from doing many of the things middle-class families are encouraged to do: Save for retirement. Build an emergency fund. Take advantage of tax-free college savings. And, while Marcella and Dave’s story is tragic, the financial precariousness they endured even before the accident is all too common in America, where the prevalence of low-income work and unequal access to education have generated vast—and growing—economic inequality. The implementation of the ACA has cut the number of uninsured and underinsured and reduced some disparities in coverage, but continues to leave too many people open to tremendous risk. Behind the statistics and beyond the ideological battles are human beings whose lives are stunted by policies that purport to help them. In showing how and why this happens, Trapped in America’s Safety Net offers a way to change it. “An engaging narrative account of how social assistance programs shape real people’s lives. Campbell is authoritative and scholarly, yet warm and personal—a rare combination one sees in the likes of Oliver Sacks and Barbara Ehrenreich.” —Deborah A. Stone, author of Policy Paradox “Makes a compelling case for a stronger, more integrated, and ultimately more effective strategy for helping the millions of Americans who find themselves plummeting out of the insecure middle class.” —Jacob S. Hacker, New York Times–bestselling coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics

At the center of a terrorized society buttressed by oppressive police protection and surveillance is the Tolm family, Fritz, the father, the elected head of the Association, and the children, part of the counter-culture.

For years, America has been plagued by slow economic growth and increasing inequality. In The Captured Economy, Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles identify a common factor behind these twin ills: breakdowns in democratic governance that allow wealthy special interests to capture the policymaking process for their own benefit. They document the proliferation of regressive regulations that redistribute wealth and income up the economic scale while stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. They also detail the most important cases of regulatory barriers that have worked to shield the powerful from the rigors of competition, thereby inflating their incomes: subsidies for the financial sector's excessive risk taking, overprotection of copyrights and patents, favoritism toward incumbent businesses through occupational licensing schemes, and the NIMBY-led escalation of land use controls that drive up rents for everyone else. An original and counterintuitive interpretation of the forces driving inequality and stagnation, The Captured Economy will be necessary reading for anyone concerned about America's mounting economic problems and how to improve the social tensions they are sparking.

The gap between the rich and the poor has grown dramatically in the United States and is now at its widest since at least the early 1900s. While by most measures the economy has been improving, soaring cost of living and stagnant wages have done little to assuage economic anxieties. Conditions like these seem designed to produce a generation-defining intervention to balance the economic scales and enhance opportunities for those at the middle and bottom of the country’s economic ladder—but we have seen nothing of the sort. Nathan J. Kelly argues that a key reason for this is that rising concentrations of wealth create a politics that makes reducing economic inequality more difficult. Kelly convincingly shows that, when a small fraction of the people control most of the economic resources, they also hold a disproportionate amount of political power, hurtling us toward a self-perpetuating plutocracy, or an “inequality trap.” Among other things, the rich support a broad political campaign that convinces voters that policies to reduce inequality are unwise and not in the average voter’s interest, regardless of the real economic impact. They also take advantage of interest groups they generously support to influence Congress and the president, as well as state governments, in ways that stop or slow down reform. One of the key implications of this book is that social policies designed to combat inequality should work hand-in-hand with political reforms that enhance democratic governance and efforts to fight racism, and a coordinated effort on all of these fronts will be needed to reverse the decades-long trend.

Shapiro, the author of "Black Wealth/White Wealth," blends personal stories, interviews, empirical data, and analysis to illuminate how family assets produce dramatic consequences in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.

Publisher description

Winner of a Gold Medal, 2017 Living Now Book Award in the Caregiving category Shortlisted for the 2016 Sarton Women's Book Awards in the Memoir category presented by the Story Circle Network For millions of Americans caregiving is the "new normal." For Laura Katz Olson, a respected researcher of long-term care for the aging, Elder Care Journey chronicles the disruption of her world and how it is upended by the ever-increasing long-distance needs of her own mother. A healthy, Senior Olympics medal winner, Olson's mother is slowly and steadily incapacitated by Parkinson's disease and a gradual loss of vision. Thrust into a long-distance caregiving role, Olson finds her previous academic notions about assisting a frail parent increasingly at odds with the reality of the lived experience. In a narrative full of "ah-ha!" moments, tears, sighs, and outrage that will be familiar to many, Olson opens a window into the nursing home and home care industries that consume much in the way of taxpayer dollars, but often fail to deliver quality care. Olson's personal story vividly demonstrates not only the overwhelming bureaucratic barriers faced by care-dependent seniors but also their beleaguered adult children's attempts to ensure their parents' health, safety, and well-being.