Wealth Gap between Rich and Poor in the US

Document Type:Essay

Subject Area:Social Work

Document 1

S. In today’s society, lots of social issues can be related to people’s lives, some of those issues are beneficial but some of them are harmful. In this paper, I am going to discuss one issue that I think relates to everybody’s lives, the wealth gap between rich and poor in the U. S. This issue or topic can be seen every nation across the world. The reason I think the wealth gap is related to the classism is because that classism is a relative social ranking based on income, wealth, education, occupational status and power (Lundy 2007). So, clearly people with more money end up in high-socio-economic-classes whereas people with no money or fewer money end up in low-socio-economic-classes. Everybody in different classes are more likely to be associated with people in their own classes.

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Because higher classes are willing to make more money, lower classes have no access to higher classes so they have to stick with the lower ones. This scenario will only leads to one consequence, that people in higher classes will make more money whereas people in the lower classes will remain the same or even make less. Higher classes people get their money from lower classes people due to greater resources and priorities. For example, in stock market, when one stock price is about to rise or fall, people with more resources will get this information earlier than people with fewer resources, so they can make correct decisions and get benefit out of it. Similar to my last paragraph, the advantage groups are people in higher classes and the disadvantage groups are people in lower classes.

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Because people in higher classes have access to greater resources, they might even have connections with the government so they can get beneficial information as early as possible. Higher classes might even have access to gain more rights. It is believed that the indigenous people of North America moved here from Asia through the Bering Strait region about 20,000 years ago (Morin, 2013). This indigenous population was organized into tribes, and in some cases constituted tribal unions. They traded among themselves, but before the advent of European settlers had little contact with the peoples of other continents, even with other natives of South America. If they had any economic systems, the European immigrants who came to their lands destroyed them. The social problems of most countries are usually of the same type. The issues of social inequality, which in the world are mainly associated with a small number of wealthy people and mass poverty, in the United States, have a completely different dimension (Keister, 2015).

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Related to this is the struggle of the leading finance ministries of the leading countries against concealing incomes of the upper classes from taxes in offshores, limiting bonuses and salaries are some aspects of avoiding the obvious “demonstrative injustice. ” The presence of vertical elevators, the stability of democracy and the rule of law, was one of the opportunities to solve the inequality problem. The prospects to achieve personal success still look attractive for members of the social strata and immigrants from countries with different levels of development who have received a different and a decent education. But one cannot deny the existence of a severe contradiction between the level of economic growth of the USA and such deep inequality. But subsequently, income inequality quickly increased. By 2011, the share of the group with incomes of less than $ 35,000 had noticeably improved.

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In general, the weights of the higher and lower groups were noticeably shifted with an inevitable “thinning” of the middle. In recent decades, the national structure of society in the United States has changed significantly, but the proportion of the middle class in the Hispanic and African-American groups for any definition of its upper boundary has grown slightly with a large portion of the poor. The much better position is the Asian group, in which the percentage of the middle class in 2011 is the same as in the group of whites (Saez & Zucman, 2016). When considering the problems of social inequality and poverty within the country, we proceed from the rational egoism of the American establishment, and not from its altruistic considerations, which are also sometimes characteristic of it. We see certain attempts to improve the position of the lower strata of the middle class, to give a chance to new cohorts to realize the “American dream” (in the broad sense of the word) of personal success as a kind of compensation for actual deep inequality (Western, 2016).

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The question of the content of the concept of "American dream" for us is associated with the idea of "equality of opportunity. Education is a prerequisite for the harmonious and sustainable development of society and achieving the desired equity and equality. Besides knowledge, provision of equal opportunities for all members of society can be helpful in achieving equality. References Keister, L. A. Wealth in America: Trends in wealth inequality. Cambridge University Press. Lundy, C. Wealth inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from capitalized income tax data. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(2), 519-578. Western, B. Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality. Contemporary Sociology, 30(4), 335.

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