Overview

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. 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. 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 United States 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.

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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. Born and raised in Southern California by immigrant parents, Rebecca Lam is an Asian American-Pacific Islander narrator. Lover of traveling, pickled veggies, and rescue animals, Rebecca resides in Los Angeles, California, with her too-curious-for-his-own-good snowshoe cat, Clark Gable. Born and raised in Southern California by immigrant parents, Rebecca Lam is an Asian American-Pacific Islander narrator. Lover of traveling, pickled veggies, and rescue animals, Rebecca resides in Los Angeles, California, with her too-curious-for-his-own-good snowshoe cat, Clark Gable.

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