For all its limitations, a worthwhile contribution to an important discussion.
A plan for tax reform that aims to relieve American workers of undue financial burdens and restore the nation’s competitiveness as a manufacturer.
Despite being an “economic powerhouse,” the United States “has managed to lose much of its manufacturing prowess,” and most low-tech production has taken flight to other countries like China, observes Olsen. We cannot simply accept an economy that runs singularly on services, he asserts. “We need to make more of our own things.” Much of the problem lies in the tax code, per the author, which seems to punish the average American worker—the linchpin of the nation’s economic competitiveness—and reward risky financial speculation. To remedy the problem, Olsen lucidly proposes a sweeping tax reform plan and suggests adopting a single-payer national health care plan and a “Child Sustenance Assistance Service.” The money to pay for these programs and tax cuts will come from taxing stock market and real estate speculation, the latter of which, according to the author, not only artificially raises housing prices but also destabilizes communities (these are provocative points argued with impressive analytical rigor). Olsen’s approach is free of any partisan rhetoric or ideological axioms; in fact, he roundly criticizes both communism and free-market capitalism as “too mechanistic.” At the heart of the book is a stirring paean to the nobility of work and the central significance of the American worker to the economy as a whole. (“A foundational principle of America is that the economy’s very purpose is to serve the needs and aspirations of the American workforce.”) This is a very brief book—well under 100 pages of main text—and such a quick treatment of so many complex issues can’t be decisively persuasive. The author’s discussion of alleviating poverty is particularly vague, and seems to amount to little more than hiring more case managers. However, the true value of this slim volume is that it stimulates further discussion by offering a perspective often neglected—one that places everyday workers, rather than disruptive entrepreneurs, at the top of the nation’s economic hierarchy.
For all its limitations, a worthwhile contribution to an important discussion.Pub Date: April 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781734233254
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Breaking Wave Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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