The Widening Gap between the Rich and the Poor in the United States

And though the United States has the world's biggest economy, it also faces many challenges. There is a significant disparity in the pay and pensions of all employers in the nation, with many Americans earning relatively little due to a small minority of employees earning a lot of money. In terms of wages, there is still a significant disparity between professional, semi-skilled, and unskilled jobs. They are best described in an inverted cone analogy where “the skilled class of workers” is at the top of the cone which implies that they are “few compared to the semi-skilled” and non-skilled workforce (Morgan and Nathan 88). In the country, a few individuals and institutions have a lot of wealth compared to the majority who are just above and below the poverty line.

This few individual, the wealthy, somehow run the economy. Technology advancement has hit the economy hard with increase in use of machines to replace human labor. Even though most people are literate in the country, is still a small percentage who lack proper education to compete with the rest. These among other factors contribute to the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich in the United States and has hindered further growth of the economy. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening yearly due to the unequal distribution of wealth and resources.

The problem of economic disparity is related to the ideas of equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. The government should major on giving its citizens better and equal chances of proper education. This will help increase the number of skilled-labor workforces thus reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. It also should be done by taxing the wealthy more while the poor less, by so doing “a lot of money is taken away from those who have plenty” while those who have less very little is taken away (Chetty 1755). The government should also use the taxes to improve the living standards of the less fortunate who are the majority. It should also increase the minimum wages so that the “poor workers could afford the high living standards”; by so doing, the poor will be able to get a better education, proper infrastructure, and even medical attention (Hurst and Anne 24). Hence, providing a better education for labors, balancing the tax rates, and increasing the minimum wage can solve the problem of economic inequality.

A countries economic system is a way to determine its financial wage distribution. For instance, in a capitalist economy where every citizen works for themselves and own private property then, a very small number of people are very wealthy and they control the country’s economy. Every individual pulls property to themselves and their families and the result is a society with very few rich individuals and very many poor people who are not able to grab the prevailing economic opportunities. The gap, therefore, widens day in and day out. This is contrary to the communist economies where most institutions are government owned; this implies that the “government has control of the money” in the economy fully (Pritchett 123). The government distributes resources equally across the country and people are given an equal platform to enjoy every service communally. The gap between the poor and the rich might be good for the economy in terms of the producing and consuming classes. However, if abused then it might cause adverse effects to the economy; for instance, it might breed segregation where the high social class is completely separated from the rest. Thus in order to strengthen a country’s economy widening the gap might be beneficial to a country’s economy, but abusing can cause some problems.

Globalization and technology might contribute towards the widening of the gap. Technology advancements like replacement of human labor with robots have led to retrenchment of many people, mostly semi-skilled and non-skilled, leading to unemployment levels increasing a great deal. This is because the “less educated individuals” have very “minimal occupational mobility” (Lindert and Jeffrey 280). Globalization might affect the gap in the sense that it might lead to and in a flock of cheap labor to a country; the local producers would definitely go for it thus many people end up losing jobs or being forced to work under poor circumstances. Therefore, developing technology and easiness of distribution of technology to other countries affects the workers’ competition

Conclusion

Not only in the United States, but also in the world, the gap between rich and people is increasing every year. Some experts believe that the widening of the gap is a huge problem. On the other hand, some experts disagree about it, and if it is used well, then the widening of the gap might help a country’s economy to develop.

Works Cited

Morgan, Jana, and Nathan J. Kelly. "Social Patterns of Inequality, Partisan Competition, and Latin American Support for Redistribution." The Journal of Politics 79.1 (2017): 0-990.

Chetty, Raj, et al. "The association between income and life expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014." Jama 315.16 (2016): 1750-1766.

Hurst, Charles E., Heather M. Fitz Gibbon, and Anne M. Nurse. Social inequality: Forms, causes, and consequences. Routledge, 2016.

Pritchett, Billie. "Fighting poverty in the twenty-first century: conditions, contributors, problems, and solutions." (2016).

Lindert, Peter H., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "Unequal gains: American growth and inequality since 1700." Juncture 22.4 (2016): 276-283.