How Washington Is Strangling America Summary

Martin Louis Gross was born on Aug. 15, 1925, and grew up poor in the Bronx. He got his Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the City College of New York. Before he started writing books he was a newspaper and magazine article writer. He even founded his own magazine in 1970 called the Intellectual Digest and later became the editor for Book Digest.
In the book A Call for Revolution: How Washington is Strangling America—And How to Stop It there is a main point that the author Martin L. Gross is trying to get across, and it is that Washington really is strangling America. The book gives several examples of this, how we can prevent it, and how to stop it. In the book Gross claims that if the government put his budget plan to use it
would save us an approximate $350 billion. But to do this we must first reform our government. On page 15 Gross wrote, “First, there must be new citizen awareness, followed by a program to clean up all that has gone wrong.
What is needed is a Citizen’s revolution, one organized by an educated populace with an agenda for real change.” He even goes as far as saying that the changes to our government are not going to be minor and even wrote a bill of 33 indictments. Gross also talks about how the growth of American earning has been going backwards instead of the once thought forwards. The average hourly wage in 1973 of people who aren’t managers was $145 a week. But in 1993 adjusted for inflation it would be $465 but they did not get that much they only got $370 almost $100 less. In chapter two “More Pork, More Waste” Gross talks about the government wasting money on useless projects. The government spent $500,000 building a replica of the Great Pyramid of Egypt in Indiana and mass federal funds were spent studying why people are rude on tennis courts and smile on bowling alleys. One project that stuck out to me was the government spending $315,000 to memorialize a South Carolina home that belonged to signer of the Constitution Charles Pickney. Which makes sense, but Charles Pickney died before the house was ever built. Gross even had an informant who
worked for the government who was an official at the National Furniture Center in Virginia. Gross’ informant told him that the government spends an approximate $676 million a year on just decorating government facilities. The Government also gave away natural resource rich land like nothing. From 1987 to 1993 the U.S. Government gave away $91.3 billion in mining land.