Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class Audiobook

Quotes

• Important.... The collapse of the American middle class and the huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy is the biggest domestic story of our time.

  — Jonathan Alter, The New York Times Book Review

• ““How can hedge-fund managers who are pulling down billions sometimes pay a lower tax-rate than do their secretaries?’ ask the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker (of Yale) and Paul Pierson (University of California, Berkeley) in their deservedly lauded new book, Winner-Take-All Politics. If you want to cry real tears about the American dream—as opposed to the self-canonizing tears of John Boehner—read this book and weep. The authors’ answer to that question and others amount to a devastating indictment of both parties…The book deflates much of the conventional wisdom.”

  — New York Times

• “Important…The collapse of the American middle class and the huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy is the biggest domestic story of our time…The good news reported by Hacker and Pierson is that American wealth disparities—are not the residue of globalization or technology or anything else beyond our control. There’s nothing inevitable about them. They’re the result of politics and policies, which tilted toward the rich beginning in the 1970s and can, with enough effort, be tilted back over time (emphasis added for impatient liberals).”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “A must-read book…It broke down what was at stake in 2010 and will be at stake in 2012 better than anything I’ve read…Hacker and Pierson show how politics has become ‘organized combat.’”

  — Salon

• “Engrossing…Hacker and Pierson…deliver the goods…Their description of the organizational dynamics that have tilted economic policymaking in favor of the wealthy is convincing.”

  — Harvard Business Review

• “Buy a copy of Hacker and Pierson’s book and read it. Seriously…This is the most complete and sustained explanation I’ve ever read of why, over the past thirty years, America has gone the direction it has even while most other countries haven’t…For me, it was a three-hundred-page ‘Aha!’ moment.”

  — Mother Jones

• “Hacker and Pierson make a compelling case. If Marie Antoinette were alive, she might aver of today’s great economically challenged masses, ‘Let them nibble on passbook-savings-account interest’—if they can manage to save anything, that is.”

  — Christian Science Monitor

• “How the US economic system has also moved ‘off center’ toward an extreme concentration of wealth, and how progressive efforts to reverse that trend have run aground…A very valuable book.”

  — Washington Monthly