Anne Kim — Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America's Poor - with Paul Glastris

Watch author Anne Kim's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs such as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and affordable housing vouchers and subsidies. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the "corporate poverty complex," a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that profit from the bureaucracies regulating the lives of the poor. From bail bondsmen to dialysis providers to towing companies, their business models depend on exploiting low-income Americans, and their political influence ensures a thriving set of industries where everyone profits except the poor, while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill.

In Poverty for Profit, veteran journalist Anne Kim investigates the multiple industries that infiltrate almost every aspect of the lives of the poor--health care, housing, criminal justice, and nutrition. She explains how these businesses are aided by public policies such as the wholesale privatization of government services and the political influence these industries wield over lawmakers and regulators.

Supported by original investigative reporting on the lesser-known players profiting from the antipoverty industry, Poverty for Profit adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of how structural inequality and structural racism function today.

Anne Kim is a writer, lawyer, and public policy expert with a long career in Washington, DC-based think tanks working in and around Capitol Hill. She is also a contributing editor at Washington Monthly, where she was a senior writer. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Governing, TheAtlantic.com, the Wall Street Journal, Democracy, and numerous other publications. The author of Abandoned: America's Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection and Poverty for Profit (both from The New Press), she lives in northern Virginia.

Kim is in conversation with Paul Glastris. Glastris Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly since 2001, is the co-author of two books, The Other College Guide and Elephant in the Room: Washington in the Bush Years. He was previously a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, and before that a correspondent and editor at U.S. News and World Report. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.

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