The Vast Wealth Inequality Of America And The Rest Of The World

James Madison once stated inequality of the rich and poor predicament to be “evil” and believed that the government should avoid an “immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches” (Johnston, 2016). As one of the founding fathers of our nation, James Madison had a concern about the separation between the rich and the poor. He felt the government should do what it could to avoid the separation, which one can infer that he meant for the government to tax the rich by a greater percentage, thus reducing the financial burden on the poor. A rift has always been present between the rich and the poor throughout history. Depending upon the job, the working class may or may not make enough to support a family. At this point, the

According to Inequality.org, “We equate wealth with ‘net worth,’ the sum total of your assets minus liabilities. Assets can include everything from an owned personal residence and cash in savings accounts to investments in stocks/bonds, real estate, and retirement accounts. Liabilities cover what a household owes: a car loan, credit card balance, student loan, mortgage, or any other bill yet to be paid. In the United States, wealth inequality runs even more pronounced than income inequality” (Wealth). Wealth disparity affects everyone in America. When the top twenty percent of earners in America take over fifty percent of total earnings in any given year, It can be see as very unfair by anyone who is in the middle class and especially the lower class of citizens in the U.S. It is safe to say that both sides of the political world (Republicans and Democrats) are equally worried about how economic inequality will affect their children and future generations. No matter who you ask, rich or poor, and whatever their opinion on the shape of economic distribution in America is, they most likely have a unrealistic sense of the state it is actually in.

There is no doubt that wealth inequality in America has been escalating quickly; the portion of total income earned by the top one percent has doubled since the beginning of the 1970’s. The wealthy are the main beneficiaries

Wealth inequality has become a hot-topic in recent years, this is because the return rate on capital, such as stocks or real estate, outruns that of economic growth which resulted in the wealthiest grasping a growing share of wealth, leading to increasing inequality. The unequal distribution of wealth has been a major hallmark of the U.S economy, and among its most notable and lasting results, but until it was brought to the awareness of the public by the Occupy movement’s catch phrase referring to “the 1%” of the populace who control half of the nation’s wealth, this issue had not been brought to the limelight of public economic and political discourse since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and almost every American is basically unaware of the true magnitude and character of the unequal distribution of wealth in our country. Inequality in wealth i.e. the sum of household savings, home equity, investments, and debts is

Today in America, income and wealth inequality has continued to grow at an unsettling pace. The rich continue to get richer, while the number of people categorized as lower class grows exponentially. As Joseph Stiglitz has explained, many theories that are seen as strongly Republican, such as the trickle-down effect, has caused the rich to take money from the poor, and as a result the lower class grows and the middle class disintegrates. The top 1 percent of America’s households currently holds 30 percent of America’s economy, which is much more than other first-world countries and helps to emphasize the extremity of inequality currently in America today. This increased inequality has in turn caused America to become a much more divided society; those born in poverty typically stay in poverty, with little to no chance of self-improvement due to a lack of education provided in their areas. In contrast, those that are born wealthy typically go to better schools, have better health care, and are all but spoon fed information on how to remain wealthy. These two sides of society almost never cross, and this causes the country to be more divided than ever. In order to limit this inequality, drastic changes must be made, such as large corporations paying their fair share of taxes and giving back to the lower class, and minimum wage should be raised. If everyone in America works together, we can raise social mobility and re-unite what has become an increasingly divided country.

As we move closer to the 2016 national elections in the United States, claims of a growing wealth gap between the supposed “haves” and “have-nots” becomes more pronounced. Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even went so far as to caution us that we are advancing towards a repeat of the “Gilded Age of the robber barons”. The insinuation in this claim creates a perception that there are a growing number of individuals within American society using questionable methods to increase their wealth, all at the expense of the not so fortunate. So-called culprits of these activities are often referred to as the “top 1 percent”; a term gaining a strong foothold in our current vernacular. Although the existence of an income inequality gap is evident, subjectively misinterpreted data is the primary culprit driving the perception that the income inequality gap is expanding.

The wealth gap, or wealth inequality, is known as the unequal distribution of assets within a population. The wealth gap in America between the lower and upper classes is rising exponentially. This imbalance within the distribution of wealth leaves those who aren’t as financially stable to struggle to achieve the same standard of education, and overall living necessities, such as housing, as those who’s wealth persistently grows. The rising wealth gap plaguing American society is bringing those of the lower and middle classes to a set disadvantage point compared to those who have an affluent amount of money. Although this inequality is contributing to an emergent opportunity gap, a solution can arise through new legislation concerning financial

Vermont Senator and presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, said it best when he said “A nation will not serve morally or economically when so few have so much, and so many have so little.” This quote perfectly describes the issue that The United States is currently dealing with: income inequality. Income inequality is the gap between how much money is made by the rich and everyone else in the nation. It also refers to the unequal distribution of wealth among people in a population. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States has steadily been rising, making it seem as though economic growth is stable (Inequality for All). However, it does not take into account the increasingly widening gap between the 1% and the 99% of the nation’s population. Government officials should pay closer attention to income inequality in The United States because ignoring the issue ultimately hurts American citizens.

In the video, Wealth Inequality in America, there were many things that caught my attention the second time around that i had not understood the first time listening to it. When they had surveyed 5,000 people I was not surprised to see that the ideal for most Americans would be a somewhat even distribution of wealth among the various groups. What I was most shocked about was what most American think about the distribution of wealth is not even close to what the reality has to hold. The fact that lowest 20 - 30 percent don't even register as sharing in the wealth of America as they are behind the poverty line. They are living of “pocket change”. The top 1 percent didn't even shock me as much as how the middle class did.

The crowd began filing into Sister Jean’s soup kitchen on Pacific Ave. in Atlantic City, N.J. well before lunch was to be served, while directly across the street, people with money to burn strolled into Donald Trump’s massive and garish Taj Mahal casino.

Wealth inequality is a controversial topic because money distribution in America doesn’t ‘seem right. The upper class possess most of the wealth in America and the bottom don’t nearly get as much.

The divide between the rich and the poor is defined by success. While the wealthy live in a utopian world where everything goes according to their needs, low class individuals live in a dysfunctional society trying to make ends meet. Aside from the obvious differences, society judges you by the size of your wallet. In The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, by Matt Taibbi, he argues about the large wealth gap that most of individuals are oblivious to and sometimes refuse to see. Taibbi goes after the truth, uncovering how white collar criminals walk freely after committing the biggest of crimes, while the blue collars get criminalized and convicted for simple misdemeanors. The wealth gap between these

Wealth inequality is already shaping American politics and society, and has the dangerous potential to be the defining problem of the upcoming generation. A sizable cause for wealth inequality in America is a dire lack of

The number of children who are living in poverty have decreased for the first time in almost ten years. The Census Bureau reported a 0.5 percent decrease of Americans living in poverty from 2012 to 2013. Poverty is among the country’s contemporary social problems in the Twenty-First Century. According to the Census Bureau, 45.3 million people were categorized as living in poverty in 2013. To address contemporary social problems like poverty, one must take an in depth look at the reasons why there are so many people dealing with poverty and the challenges that arise from trying to escape it.

Imagine the cool, refreshing feeling of ice-cold water colliding with the dusty, dry-caked layer of your mouth for the first time after a strenuous day of working in the heat. At your construction job, you and 89 fellow laborers worked on completing the final floor in a sixteen-story building project in Lower Manhattan. After you took a swig of water from the share of the entire worker’s cooler, you returned to the cooler for another small dixie-cup round of water, but nothing came out. Unsatisfied, you looked around for a cool libation to suppress the uncomfortable frustration that started boiling inside of you in the hot, scorching midsummer blaze. You soon found a sense of sympathy when you realized that the guy behind you in line did not even get a single drop of water. In fact, out of the 90 workers, less than one-third of you actually got a single cup of water. After a few moments passed and the mental and physical stress started affecting your production, you gazed off at the building adjacent to your site. You never really payed any attention to the building for the last 8 months, but your eyes started to focus in on the actions of those inside it. The only person you could discern on