EP 388 America: What Went Wrong Revisited

In 1992, when Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters, Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, set out to first determine what had gone wrong with America’s promise for its people economically and socially they found troubling signs of pervasive inequality and the public sector weakened to a point where it was unable to craft new policies to address the problems. They documented the impacts on people’s lives with hard evidence. With the passage of time, they saw those trends worsening and set about to document a growing problem in their updated 2020 edition of their book, ‘America: What Went Wrong? The Crisis Deepens’. This portrayal finds an economy in which millions of Americans find their wages stagnant, their health care unaffordable and the prospect of an impoverished retirement. This no accident. America’s tax policy and indifference to many who have a weak political voice has brought us to this point. And recent events have only made matters worse and shone a bright light on these issues. Our guest, James Steele, explains how we got here over the course of the last four decades.

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