ABSTRACT
In Social Solutions to Poverty, I concluded by challenging readers to select one of the forty-plus poverty strategies discussed in the book and to get busy implementing it. As I said in the beginning of this book, if I had taken up my own challenge, I would not have chosen civic works. At the time I wrote the book, conservatives controlled the entire federal government, so a civic works project had little chance of becoming enacted. However, in late August 2005 all of that changed when Hurricane Katrina blew threw the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Katrina exposed to the nation and the world our secret—that the United States leads the industrialized nations in poverty rates and that our public infrastructure is literally crumbling.
