Shop Notes
'Betrayal' climbs best-sellers list
Posted: Aug. 30, 2012 | Tags: Workshop news
Journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele head to Hunter College in New York next week, where they will talk about their new book, "The Betrayal of the American Dream," in which the reporting team showed how the middle-class standard of living has been eroded by policies in Washington and practices on Wall Street
They will speak at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at 6 p.m. Sept. 5, sharing stories from the many people interviewed for the book. They'll also talk about the numbers behind those stories, including these figures: If you were one of the richest Americans in 1955, you paid on average about 51.2 percent of your income in federal taxes. If you were one of the richest Americans in 2007, your tax rate had plummeted to an average of 16.6 percent.
Barlett and Steele and the Investigative Reporting Workshop collaborated on the research for the book and for a series of stories the two wrote for the Workshop's project, titled What Went Wrong: The Betrayal of the American Dream. The Workshop and The Philadelphia Inquirer recently published a series of book excerpts, and you can read the original Inquirer What Went Wrong series published 20 years ago.
The new book is now No. 19 on The New York Times list of non-fiction best-sellers, and it is No. 7 on the Los Angeles Times list.
