Friday, July 23, 2021

Reprise Review: Side Effects: What Candidates Don't Tell You by Tomas Payne

 


Genre: Non-Fiction/Politics

Description:

Side-Effects: What Candidates Don’t Tell You takes you behind the scenes on issues of the day and campaign promises. It focuses on consequences, issues, and options. It also challenges myths such as who are the wealthy, and what is the history of depressed wages. The emphasis is on shedding light, exposing myths, examining consequences, and exploring options, not on personalities. Sorry, no dirt on the people, just on their promises.

Side-Effects will answer questions such as:

Will raising income and estate taxes hurt the billionaires and redistribute wealth?

Why healthcare is broken and what options we have.

Why wages are depressed and what we can do about it.

What are the implications of various immigration plans?

Side-Effects cuts through the BS to look at campaign promises on wealth redistribution, taxes, Social Security, healthcare, depressed wages, and many other topics that aims to bring facts to these issues.”

Author:

“Author is a CPA and has an MBA in finance, a BS in Political Science, and over 30 years of experience in business. He is a long time student of business, the ever-entertaining field of economics, and of the political shell game.

Like many of you, he is frustrated by candidates not addressing the real issues or doing so with simplistic sound bites that don't stand up to scrutiny. That's why he dove into campaign promises to see how they fared and found a number of surprises he'd like to share with you.”

Appraisal:

Of all the books I've ever read on contemporary politics, this book has some qualities that I've never seen before. Depending on what you'd prefer to get from a book like this, you could perceive those qualities as positive or negative.

In the early days of the US, political theorist Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense and now an author with essentially the same name (maybe Tomas Payne is a pen name?) shows a lot of common sense in exploring the current political environment in the US. Payne explains his thinking clearly and in multiple instances had me questioning my current political stances. If that possibility concerns you, this book isn't for you. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum you'll almost surely find that Payne agrees with you on some things and disagrees on others. If you're willing to have your thoughts and political beliefs challenged, this book will do the trick.

Buy now from:    Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

Original review posted June 24, 2016.

Format/Typo Issues:

No significant issues

Rating: ***** Five Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 55-60,000 words

No comments: