Review by Booklist Review
In her new book, Kim, a public-policy expert and attorney, boldly presents "Poverty Inc.," which she defines as U.S. government antipoverty programs that benefit everyone except the poor. Totaling 900 billion dollars annually, programs include Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). However, private contractors deliver most of the social services poor Americans receive. Corporations often profit from projects like building public housing. Bail bondsmen offer high-interest loans to those who can't afford to make bail and collect debts even after an acquittal. Kim delves into the behind-the-scenes happenings in these scenarios, like bail bondsmen organizing to oppose bail reform and private companies donating to political campaigns to defeat regulations aimed at their industries, keeping money in the private sector. In the end, Kim leaves readers with five takeaways to help with transformation and a warning of hard work ahead to reform "the machinery of U.S. social policy" by looking at who benefits the most. Readers will be intrigued by this well-researched book and will develop an understanding of how the infrastructure of poverty is a big business.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Corporations are taking advantage of sclerotic government to skim money off anti-poverty initiatives, according to this stinging exposé. Lawyer and journalist Kim (Abandoned) probes a raft of ill-designed and poorly supervised federal and state programs that are run or mediated by private businesses that jack up prices and deliver substandard services. They include tax preparers that charge low-income taxpayers exorbitant fees to calculate the tax credits they are due, private prisons that charge inmates hundreds of dollars per day for their accommodations, slumlords who make a mint off of low-income housing vouchers, food service companies that sell junk food to kids in school cafeterias, and dental clinic franchises that squeeze profits out of Medicaid reimbursements by subjecting poor kids to painful and unnecessary treatments. (Kim spotlights one three-year-old who was subjected to 17 root canals and caps on his baby teeth.) Kim finds plenty of culprits to blame beyond the sleazy corporations: conservatives who insist that business does everything better than government, politicians on the right and the left who cut sweetheart deals with capitalist cronies, a Congress that lurches from one ungainly social-service scheme to the next. Kim's writing is sharp-eyed and two-fisted--"The goal should be to expunge the parasitic industries dragging down U.S. antipoverty efforts"--as she untangles these knots of incompetence and fraud. It's an electrifying unmasking of appalling violations of public trust. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A startling study of how private companies--and their wealthy executives--exploit poor customers. As Washington Monthly contributing editor Kim, author of Abandoned: America's Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection, demonstrates in this searing text, some of the nation's most vulnerable populations are fertile ground for predatory private businesses that take advantage of them and send the bill to the federal government. This "vast ecosystem of industries" (which the author calls "Poverty Inc.") costs the federal government--and consequently, taxpayers--a staggering $900 billion per year. This dizzying array of companies includes medical care, food provision, and prison services. Kim's litany of well-documented stories are both sobering and infuriating: Tax preparation companies are able to prey on low-income households because "the tax code is complex, and taxpayers are fearful." Consulting firms get rich off running states' antipoverty programs. A network of "American Job Centers" often fails to adequately prepare participants for employment. "Health care profiteer" franchises such as Kool Smiles provide medically unnecessary, Medicaid-funded root canals and other procedures. Food service corporations like Aramark stock prison commissaries with low-nutrient junk food, at a markup. After chronicling the misdeeds of Poverty Inc., Kim shows how Congress could improve this morass of profiteering through sharper oversight and better data collection. The list of shoddy practices is exhaustive and devastating, and the great challenge is in shifting a system that makes too many people too much money. Not only are these industries exploitative and extremely expensive; they also contribute to persistent poverty through both passive means--incompetence and inefficiency--and active, via lobbying to block reforms that would help the poor but "endanger [corporations'] revenue streams." Poverty, in other words, is big business. A searing, rage-inducing look at how the misery of the poor lines the pockets of the rich. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
