Description
From the founder of ACORN, the nation’s largest grassroots community organization, comes this hard-hitting blueprint for helping working families establish a solid foundation of income and assets that equals true economic security—what Wade Rathke calls citizen wealth. Through compelling stories from the trenches of local, state, and national campaigns, where hardscrabble wins and smart negotiating have produced positive economic change for millions, Rathke shows how activists, government, business, and working people can join together to make citizen wealth a major priority and a visible reality.
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The federal government may have failed the poor, argues organizer and ACORN founder Wade Rathke, but there is another way: wealth-building. In Citizen Wealth, Rathke shows how food stamps, unemployment insurance, and tax relief offer temporary, stop-gap fixes but dont address the systemic problems that keep people from building up the assets they need to create a stable life for themselves and their families. A real, workable plan to end poverty, Rathke argues, requires a two-pronged approach. First, we need to create wealth through home ownership, and job acquisition and security, lengthens the distance between the poor house and the safe house. Second, we must also prevent the predatory attempts to reduce the relatively little wealth that many low and moderate-income families have. Such dual-track wealth-building approaches protect against the vicissitudes of income: temporary job loss, health issues, credit restrictions and more.
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