“A Few Thousand Dollars” — How to build inclusive prosperity in America
Our long-time friend Bob Friedman, an innovator in America's economic justice struggle and founder of Prosperity Now, has written a new book that delivers an elegant policy solution with passion and analysis. Here's our review:
Bob Friedman’s A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone offers an elegant—and proven—way to create widespread prosperity in America and renew the nation’s fundamental promise of opportunity for all. How uplifting and timely! But most of all, how instructive: turn the existing government budgets and tax incentives for family wealth building into Prosperity Accounts that provide families with money—a few thousand dollars a year—to get more education, start businesses, buy homes, save for the future, and pass money and values on to the next generation. And do it for everyone. No more money is needed because families will leverage the resources, but smarter public policies are. Policies that recognize the common good that is generated by investing in people.
Friedman makes the case for policy change with data, logic, and a sprinkling of profiles of individuals who in their lives got a crucial helping “hand up” from family, community, and government. A veteran of the nation’s economic-justice struggles, he writes with insight, clarity, passion, political savvy, and, most of all, a firm conviction that the change America so badly needs can happen.
