Tightrope Quotes

“Astonishingly, the share of students who don't get education in contraceptives is going up, not down. The Trump administration even tried to cut off funding for a teen pregnancy prevention program (lawsuits forced it to continue that funding). What's confounding is that these same officials are often anti-abortion, yet they don't seem to understand that preventing unplanned pregnancies will reduce abortions. They believe that condoms will promote promiscuity, when condoms no more cause sex than umbrellas cause rain. These same officials then thunder about the irresponsibility of girls who get pregnant, oblivious to their own irresponsibility.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“As a society, we denounce "delinquents," "hoodlums" and "hooligans," but the truth is that we routinely fail troubled kids before they fail us. More children die each year in the United States from abuse and neglect than from cancer. For every child who dies, thousands are injured, raped or brutally abused. We shrug as millions of children undergo trauma in ways that harm them and unravel our social fabric--and then we blame the kids when things go wrong.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The wealthy have also fought to underfund and defang the Internal Revenue Service, so it doesn’t have the resources to audit or fight dubious deductions. Only about 6 percent of tax returns of those with income of more than $1 million are audited, along with 0.7 percent of business tax returns. Meanwhile, there is one group that the IRS scrutinizes rigorously: the working poor with incomes below $20,000 a year who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit. More than one-third of all tax audits are focused on that group struggling to make ends meet, even as the agency cuts back on audits of the wealthy—while the top 5 percent of taxpayers account for more than half of all underreported income.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. —JOHN EHRLICHMAN, President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy adviser”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“of the 1 percent saw a bit less than a doubling of real incomes. Those in the 90th through 99th percentiles simply stayed even, with incomes growing at the same rate as per capita GDP, or gross domestic product. And the bottom 90 percent lost relative ground, with their incomes since 1980 growing more slowly than per capita GDP. The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. —PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“One might think that economic inequality leads to self-correction in democracies, as the public becomes alarmed or outraged by income gaps and institutes taxes or other policies to take from the rich or give to the poor. But this doesn’t happen often. Researchers have found that instead, in countries around the world, the accumulation of wealth also often leads to accumulation of political power that is then harnessed to multiply that wealth. Indeed, that’s what we’re seeing in America. Our political system responds to large donors, so politicians create benefits for the rich, who then reward the politicians who created them.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services--but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, State of the Union Address, 1944”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution have found that of people who follow three traditional rules—graduate from high school, get a full-time job and marry before having children—only 2 percent live in poverty. So play by these rules, called “the success sequence,” and by and large one can avoid poverty. In contrast, of those who do none of those three things, 79 percent live in poverty.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The enemy of our country is poverty and hopelessness.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“More children die each year in the United States from abuse and neglect than from cancer.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The reason we have a single-payer health-care system for the elderly (Medicare) but not for children is simple: seniors vote, and children don’t. So while American children die at 55 percent higher rates than children in other advanced countries, Americans who make it to age sixty-five and qualify for Medicare then have a remaining life expectancy similar to that of our peer countries.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Without much discussion, we have created a two-tier justice system. If you shoplift at the grocery store, you can be carted off to jail. But if you steal tens of millions of dollars from the tax authorities or fraudulently peddle dangerous drugs from a corporate suite, you’ll be hailed for your business savvy.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“If we don’t address the root suffering of Americans, even if you took every opioid pill away, that suffering will manifest into another social and public health problem,” he told us. “If we want to end, truly end the opioid crisis, we need to understand the basic causes of suffering and pain in America.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered to ratify it.”
― Nicholas D Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Throughout this book, we've tried to argue that America has gone astray by perceiving poverty or drugs simply as a choice or as the consequence of personal irresponsibility. Yet in another sense, poverty is a choice. It is a choice by the country. The United States has chosen policies over the last half century that have resulted in higher levels of homelessness, overdose deaths, crime and inequality--and now it's time to make a difference choice.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The first step toward better policy is to amend our understanding of people's struggles so that it is less about individual irresponsibility and more about our collective irresponsibility in tolerating levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in the rest of the developed world.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“There has been a growing premium in the labor market for educated workers, but Mississippi and other southern states have underinvested in education and other forms of human capital, particularly for blacks but also for whites. The South’s strategy was to cut taxes, on the theory that low taxes would attract businesses and boost the economic growth rate, but this was not terribly effective in the age of the knowledge economy. High-paying, high-technology employers want low tax rates, of course, but above all they require a pool of educated workers, so they often end up investing in high-tax, high-education states like California, Massachusetts and New York. This is amplified when right-wing politicians in the South defend Confederate statues or demonize gays or transgender people, and the result is further economic backwardness and frustration. And the cycle repeats.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The public frets about cheating with food stamps (the fraud rate is about 1.5 percent) yet doesn’t understand that zillionaires hide assets abroad and thereby deprive the Treasury of some $36 billion a year in taxes—enough to pay for high-quality pre-K and day care for all.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Life expectancy continues to rise in most of the rest of the industrialized world, but in the United States it has dropped for three years in a row—for the first time in a century. As we’ll see, American kids today are 55 percent more likely to die by the age of nineteen than children in the other rich countries that are members of the OECD, the club of industrialized nations. America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans: it undermines our nation’s competitiveness, especially as growing economies like China’s are fueled by much larger populations and by rising education levels, and may erode the well-being of our society for decades to come. The losers are not just those at the bottom of society, but all of us. For America to be strong, we must strengthen all Americans.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“A woman in America is now roughly twice as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Britain. Shouldn’t”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“The result is that the top 1 percent now owns twice as great a share of national wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent. We went from being a world leader in opportunity to being a laggard.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“it is poverty that needs to be arrested, not the poor simply for being poor.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Similarly, Amazon paid zero federal income tax in 2018 despite profits of $11.2 billion; indeed, it managed to get a $129 million “rebate” from taxes it didn’t pay. That’s an effective tax rate of negative 1 percent.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“farmland, as President Trump did, and save large sums in taxes.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Some of the other subsidies are outlandish: put a few goats on your golf course and you can classify it as”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“about 1.5 percent) yet doesn’t understand that zillionaires hide assets abroad and thereby deprive the Treasury of some $36 billion a year in taxes—enough to pay for high-quality pre-K and day care for all. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, has”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope