Hilfiker is particularly sensitive to the source of poverty in African-American inner-city ghettoes. His recommendation for ending poverty, was one new program: universal health coverage, to which he argued convincingly, would save all of us as a nation on current health costs and yet could include the 43 million presently uninsured (Seven Stories Press).

He also suggested three other existing programs:

1) the earned income tax credit, shown by the economists as the most profitable program for bringing up families out of poverty;

2) Unemployment insurance, that could be expanded in order to distribute enough income to keep the unemployed at least at poverty level;

3) Supplemental Security Insurance for the disabled. As he noted,

As a physician, I sometimes struggled for years to get examiners at S.S.I. To understand that one or another of my patients was, indeed, disabled."

Furthermore, for Hilfiker, the fundamental grounds of American poverty were mostly structural:

Inadequate educational resources in inner cities;

Scarcity of jobs on which one can take care of a family;

Structure & workings of the criminal justice system; and,

Insufficient access to health care and child care;

distressing history of slavery, segregation and discrimination for African-Americans.

In addition, he tried to explain how morally impartial developments often had unintentional social consequences (Seven Stories Press). He further explained this point by illustrating with a trickier problem: the civil rights acts of the fifties and sixties, which eliminated legal segregation in education and housing that actually helped, make the ghettos worse, by easing a brain drain from the poor...

Even though the shift to suburban life was a culture shock, but the social infrastructures helped hugely. Children who runaway from ghetto were far more likely to graduate and went to college than the last peers they left behind (Seven Stories Press).
Conclusion

As a writer and a doctor, David Hilfiker committed his life, to people in need, writing about the urban poor with whom he has spent his last two decades. Thus, in a very magnificent and simple language, he explained as to how the myth of the urban poor that drew off valuable government resources has been in conflict by the facts, and how most programs helped some of the people but were never amply organized enough to enable people to escape the set of urban poverty (Seven Stories Press).

The book is short, agreeable, and totally without academic verboseness or pretense detailing the complex history of societal poverty, the evident weaknesses and amazing strengths of societal responses to poverty, while also presenting an analysis of models of assistance from around the world. It is easily available, plainly written book with an outstanding

Annotated Bibliography

It may also motivate common people to work toward full integration of their society (Seven Stories Press)

Works Cited

Speaking of Faith. Krista's Journal. "Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen" by David

Hilfiker. www.speakingoffaith.publicradio.orgAugust 24, 2006

Seven Stories Press. "Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen" by David

Hilfiker. www.sevenstories.com

Book Review