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Examples Of Income Inequality In The United States

1503 Words7 Pages

Robert Bunnett
Professor Ramos-Bernal
POLS 110
5/17/15
Income Inequality in the United States
People have always referred to the United States of America as being the land of opportunity. Americans strive for something called “The American Dream.” Some people believe that they have achieved this dream. However, there are many people in America that have had so many problems economically that this “dream” has become out of reach. The reason for this is because of income inequality in America. America’s economy has gone from being one of the most economically stable countries in the world, to the state it is in now. For an economy to become strong, it needs to have a strong middle class. The reason for this is because …show more content…

If they want to raise taxes on business creators and cause a further slowdown, why they can vote for President Obama” (“Don’t Tax the Job Creators”). What they meant by this title is that the head of a company is employing so many people under them. Because of this idea, many Americans believe in a “trickledown effect.” This is the idea of giving tax cuts to the richest Americans, so the money can move down to their employees. This is a flawed system that keeps getting the rich richer. The rich will do what they can to keep the money and continue to become wealthier. In the article, “Most See Inequality Growing, but Partisans Differ over Solutions,” 54% favor taxing the wealthy to expand aid to the poor. The article states that Jan. 15-19 among 1,504 adults, finds that 65% believe the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased in the last 10 years. Even though a majority sees that economic inequality is a problem, people seem to have different viewpoints on how we should fix it (pewresearch.org). The documentary, Inequality for All, mentions when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, he brought down the tax rate on the rich from 70 percent to 35 percent. However, most of the money the rich make are from capital gains. So instead of 35 percent, they are actually being taxed about 15 percent. This is the time where the nation’s income kept rising as the average pay of the middle class American froze. It is right when economic inequality started to rise once again. (Jacob

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President Barack Obama writes a very informative article on the subject of inequality within the article, “A Fundamental Threat to the American Dream”. President Obama’s goal is to inform the audience about the inequality between those who are born into rich families compared to the middle and under class families. He starts by comparing statistics of economic growth between the rich and the poor in 1979, the year he graduated high school, to the current year the article was written. Between these two dates, economic growth has been tipped to benefit the rich. With newer technology, it has caused the the size of the labor force to decrease and the wealth gap to increase.

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“The policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations, which openly favored the rich, abetted a secular trend already in motion, causing inequality to increase measurably between 1981 and 1992.” (Loewen, 215) The wealthy already had their advantage when they gained their wealth. The wealth they had helped greatly in the process

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This income inequality is explained best in a document written by David Azerrad and Rea S. Hederman Jr., titled “Defending the Dream: Why Income Inequality Doesn't Threaten Opportunity”, when they state “enforced income parity is neither desirable nor just. Because people have different native talents, upbringings, and interests, an economy in which they are free to buy, sell, trade, manufacture, produce, and invest in what they please will inevitably lead to great inequalities of wealth and income”(Azerrad and Hederman 2012). From Azerrad and Hederman we can deduce that while it isn’t wrong to have material possessions be a part of the American Dream, there is a limit to how much a person can achieve with a given set of skills, and not everyone will be able to reach that limit. Even though not everyone can achieve their Dream of vast material wealth that does not mean that they can’t achieve their American dream. Matthew Warshauer supports this point very well by saying “The American dream has always included achieving financial success …

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