Preview

rich getting richer

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
334 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
rich getting richer
In the article, “Why the Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer” Robert Reich uses examples of rising and falling boats to explain the difference between the rich and the poor, one sinking rapidly, one sinking more slowly, and the third rising steadily.
The boat sinking rapidly contains routine producers “production workers”. They are being replaced with immigrants for lower pay if not being outsourced to 3rd world countries

The second boat that is sinking slowly held in-person servers, “minimum wage workers” such as cashiers, bank tellers, and telephone operator which are being replaced with robots and other automated machines.

The third boat that is rising contains the symbolic analysts “America’s smart people”, scientist, artists, politicians, est. (But I don’t know why) “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich is a good example of the rich getting richer. She takes a low-wage, very demanding, degrading house cleaning job with strict rules such as no drinking, eating or gum chewing in the house or cursing even if the owner wasn’t present. The job gets more difficult, both physically and mentally, as the days go by. The schedule makes it difficult for anyone to even get a 30 minute lunch break, so it is usually a bag of potato chips from the local convenience store. All while the company makes $25 an hour per person and the workers only get $6.65 per hour.

The middle and lower classes of workers are now working harder for less money, while the upper classes money is actually growing exponentially. In the last decade since the dot com collapse, 65 percent of economic growth was experienced solely by the top one percent richest people in the country. As recently as 2012, that percentage grew to a surprising 93 percent. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/concentrated-wealth-is-a-long-term-threat-to-america/2012/03/27/gIQAMJt1eS_print.html All these factors play a part in the economic gap in our country it is increasingly more

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    After watching the video, "Wealth Inequality in America", published by Politizane, I was surprised when finding out that only the top one percent of America has 40 percent of all the nation's wealth. It was also surprising to discover that the top one percent owns half the country's stocks, bonds, and mutual bonds, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans own only half a percent of these investments. One of the notions I had that was challenged by the video was the amount of money the wealthy actually have compared to the rest of the classes. I was aware that wealth mostly distributed to the wealthy class, but I never imagined that the division between the wealthy class and the rest of the classes would be so huge. Its incredible that the CEO's…

    • 227 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Borstelmann notes, “The gap between rich and poor grew wider, startlingly so at times, and the bulk of the vaunted American middle class saw its economic security begin to slip away” (Borstelmann, 306). With the U.S. economy during the time period placing a premium on education, college graduates and those with advanced degrees saw their income rise. At the same time, due to globalization, lower numbers of unionized workers, and higher divorce rates, workers with high school diplomas saw a drop in their income while political leaders sat by and did nothing to mitigate this growing trend toward inequality. The U.S. had the most uneven distribution of wealth of any industrialized nation, where poverty rates reached 15 percent in 1994 and remained at 13 percent in 2008. Borstelmann notes “the rate was 18 percent for minors; nearly one in five American children were growing up in poverty in the new millennium” (Borstelmann, 308).…

    • 1719 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    This is shown in the fact that 68.7 percent of the world’s population only holds three percent of the wealth in the world and only 8.4 percent of the world’s population has 83.3 percent of the wealth of the world (Doc 6). The 68.7 percent of the world with the least amount of money often works in factories for very low wages, these factories being owned by the most wealthy. This relates to how those who get ahead have to step on others, with the wealthy exploiting the poor for their wealth.…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Rhetorical Technique

    • 330 Words
    • 2 Pages

    No one can argue that America is the country of the human rights and freedom and many people around the world dream to live in this great place. However, big problem is going to reshape the American society if nobody tried to solve it. The dilemma is simply that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer as a result of inequality of money distribution among rich and poor people.America had created a marvelous economic machine, but evidently it worked only for that at the top. Both Joseph E. Stieglitz and Timothy Noahintroduce a very critical issue which affects the American society in these days, is the widening gap between the rich and poor people. Stieglitz claims that the American economic system is failing for most of Americans and the inequality is increasing to the extent that one day will be unaffordable. The rising gap is created by the one top percent who are taking advantage of making a huge wealth. They are driven by their greed to accumulate big fortune upon poor’s shoulders. Stieglitz came up with some evidence to support his claim. One of these is the new statistics fromCensus Bureau’s statistics that shows that the one top percent gain 20 % of the total American income. Therefore, Noah says that this inequality income creates and retains the capitalism system which forms a serious threat upon middle and lower class (Noah The Great par 3).…

    • 330 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Recently with the Presidential election campaign, a lot was said about the difference between the middle class and the rich. Especially with the tax cuts issue where tax cuts are being wanted for the middle class and the wealthy shall not be given any cuts. Any household that is earning anything more than $1 million per year should not be paying lesser income tax than what a middle class family does.…

    • 1169 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The gap between the upper class and everyone else widens to a point where the richest “4,000 families in the U.S” have as much wealth as “11.6 million…

    • 1120 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    For example, the labor market looked at two separate sectors; one for skilled workers and the other for individuals with fewer skills. This article suggests numerous supply and demand reasons for the growth in the wage gap primarily because of technological changes and skill- biased technological changes. The authors also discusses…

    • 1679 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Median wages have been flat for decade or more. The quality of available jobs is declining, with a shift toward part-time and contingent work. while the Great Recession intensified these trends and added a staggering loss of housing wealth, the problems go further back and are far more systemic. In 1970s, the united state saw the growth of the country's middle class, with plenty of job prospects and economic conditions that generate business opportunities. Later on step by step that great middle class started to die out. In the article “RIP, Middle Class: 1946-2013” by Edward McClelland, the author discussed the factor that resulted of the failure of the middle class, he also said that the decline of the middle class resulted from the failure of the government policies, the failure of government to protect the interests of ordinary Americans to achieve and hold onto a middle-class standard of living. In the article, the author was so clever about his title because the title has that attention-getting element. Also he used lots of fact and dates to make the audience on his side (MacClelland…

    • 746 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Socratic Seminar

    • 1082 Words
    • 4 Pages

    That small elite has received 95% of wealth created since 2009, after the financial crisis, while the bottom 90% of Americans have become poorer, Oxfam said.…

    • 1082 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    We live in a country where the wealthy become wealthier and the poor become poorer. Due to the functions of our economy, very few of us can become successful. I was luckily born into what was considered a middle class family. As time progressed, everything became more expensive. With the same salary that my family had, they had to pay for higher insurance costs, food prices, gas prices, and survival needs.…

    • 932 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Hard Working Stereotypes

    • 1969 Words
    • 8 Pages

    In the book ‘America’s Poor and the Great Recession’ by Kristin S. Seefeldt and John D. Graham, the reasoning that in a post-recession world, having two sections of an extreme poor and an extreme rich are becoming commonplace. The book talked about how the recession was just a reaction to how much power the 1% are getting, and how their recklessness caused an economic crisis America hadn’t seen since the 1930’s. In conclusion, the authors came to the answer that not only is becoming easier to fall into the hole of poverty, it’s becoming harder to climb out, and all because of the higher-ups. It may be because the middle class are afraid to fall into the hole of poverty themselves, and the myth makes them more comfortable, knowing that they are not “lazy”, or “undereducated”. The upper class, on the other hand, might be trying to deflect the blame. “It’s not OUR fault!”, they…

    • 1969 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When the economy is growing quickly, it is easier to move up the ladder because the incomes are much more equal. The average American assumes that there is a high degree of economic mobility in our society and they accept it as a fact and rarely think about it. Little do they know that there is a relatively low degree of economic mobility, making it difficult to move up the economic ladder.…

    • 656 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Great Divergence In America

    • 2351 Words
    • 10 Pages

    With unreliable data and few resources to gain evidence of a faulty system; American politicians sometimes turn a blind eye or demean the importance of the issue. Obviously unemployment and economic deterioration are serious problems, but they are problems that would be further eased by addressing the current, historic, and growing imbalance in income inequality. The avoidance of such a current dilemma, such as the enormous gap of income, is an issue itself. For the problem to start resolving itself, we must bring the issue into the spotlight to be addressed by the officials who run our country. Income inequality, by contrast, is getting worse over time. Doesn’t it make more sense to focus attention on the problem that’s getting worse rather than all the problems—unemployment, the deficit, limited opportunity—that are not? But in turn, they could be resolved with addressing the prevalent income gap. (Noah 368)…

    • 2351 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Women's Pay Gap

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages

    gap is simply based on the different choices women and men make in their careers. According to…

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The exponentially growing gap that separates the affluent from the rest of society in America has become a truly daunting statistic. According to data collected by the IRS, the World Top Economics Database asserted that in 2010, the top .01%, which calculates into one in 10,000 people, held a 4.6% share of that year’s income. The average income of $24 million per individual in the top .01% is $23,970,000 more than the average income of the bottom 90%, which is $30,000. In the subsequent parts of this paper I aim to analyze the grounds of extreme income inequality as well as the severity of the consequences that it has on the economy and the American people.…

    • 508 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays