Big cities like New York are thriving, economically, culturally, in terms of real estate values, and by a … - Sasha Abramsky

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There are popular celebrities, there are unpopular celebrities and then there are the walking dead. You know the walking dead when you see them: they look like Mel Gibson, still striving for drunken charm in an L. A. County mug shot, after getting picked up on a DWI charge that included anti-semitic slurs directed at the police.

Sasha Abramsky

Big cities like New York are thriving, economically, culturally, in terms of real estate values, and by a slew of other measures. Yet, at the same time, much of the country has been utterly hollowed out. In California, where I live, affluent coastal cities such as San Francisco and the Silicon Valley hubs have lower than national average unemployment, higher wages, higher tax bases. Meanwhile, there are inland counties in California where there's still nearly 20 percent unemployment.

Country, Real, Taxes, Live, Counties, California

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Poverty became something one could see and experience firsthand, no matter where one was on the economic ladder; it became something you could viscerally experience through the lives of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. I'd venture to say it's a rare person in 2013 America who knows nobody who lost a job in the recession, or knows nobody whose home went underwater or who went into foreclosure.

2013, Home, Job, Neighbor, Neighbors, Poverty

We're living through an era of higher income inequality than the country has experienced since before the Great Depression. Meanwhile, most people are running in place, and those in the bottom quintile of the economy are being swept backward year in and year out. A worker with a high school education today is likely to earn less in real terms than did their parents and grandparents in the early 1970s. Not coincidentally, while overall life expectancy is increasing in America, for those with low levels of education it's actually declining.

Country, Education, Expectancy, Real, Running

You can't lift people out of poverty simply by tweaking the tax system, or by raising the minimum wage by a few cents, or by reducing student debt slightly. These might be necessary components of a larger anti-poverty program, but you have to accept they are pieces of a much larger puzzle.

Accept, People, Poverty, Puzzle, Students

To really tackle poverty, politicians, activists, academics will all have to think outside their boxes, will have to start developing much more integrated approaches to these problems. And a large part of this will involve working out ways to push for living wages. Partly this will involve re-empowering the union movement, which has been massively weakened in recent decades. Partly it will involve a willingness to restructure tax codes to penalize companies that don't provide basic benefits and decent wages to employees.

Approaches, Developing, Partly, Poverty, Thinking, Work Out

I do think there are ways to increase wages significantly, even in a global era. But you have to take voters and consumers with you on this journey - and that involves a tremendous, and long-term, public education campaign.

Journey, Thinking, Public Education, Era, Increase, Wages