Inequality In America

Superior Essays
If a survey were conducted to determine Americans’ biggest worries, most respondents would certainly say it is finances, because America has classes, and the most pronounced ones are based on economic status. The country is resident to a few super rich individuals who can afford almost anything with a financial value. At the same time, there are many who run their lives on perpetual fear of drowning in the whirlpool of poverty. Writer such as Barbare Ehrenreich, in her essay "Serving in Florida", suggest low income lead Americans to struggle in the poor life condition even forced into taking one more odd jobs. In Kathleen R. Arnold essay "From American 's New Working Class", depicts those people earning below the minimum wage rely on federal …show more content…
These Americans live a day at a time with little improvement to their situation over time. Therefore, the country seemingly transverses two worlds with contradicting conditions, the gap between the rich and the poor is wide and this keeps getting worse with time and the poor are left to rely on a myriad of rather pitiful means to survive an extra day which indicate the social Inequality along in our society.
Many Americans are often forced to take two jobs to be able to survive through life hustles. Yet, this has a significant impact on other aspects of an individual’s life. The physical and psychological strain resulting from working two jobs do little good to personal health. Ehrenreich claims in her essay “Serving in Florida”, one can choose to work for a cumulative fourteen hours since anything less proves not to be enough to make ends meet (278). That would mean lack of enough sleep and the health problems that come with it and she writes
…show more content…
Fixing wage gap would ensure that people could survive on earnings from one job instead of multiple ones. College graduates need to be encouraged to take up some professional jobs rather than choose for multiple ones that couldn 't even offer security even during the economic recession. The risk is worth the opportunity for career advancement and professional growth. In Don Peck 's essay “Generation R: The Changing Fortunes of Americana 's Youth”, he states, “Most of the people interviewed in these stories seem merely to be trying to stay positive and make the best of a bad situation. They note that 's a good time to reevaluate career choices” (300). Those new graduated feel that jobs requiring less professional qualifications are less likely to feel the effects of economic cycles. But the truth is the economic may never recovery, which means taking up jobs that seem more susceptible to poor economic cycles because when they start work in a particularly low level job or unsexy career, it 's easy for other employers to dismiss them as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult.(301) It results in stagnation in economic status much worse, as there is little chance for professional betterment. Sticking to odd jobs in the name of reevaluating one’s career path unluckily heralds generations of low-income

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Pretend you work your hardest on something expecting to get a noticed for it, but someone does the same thing and gets recognition for it. See? That’s how inequality in America is like and what many of us go through on a day to day basis. Life has all sorts of downs and ups to it as we all know it right? Let me put it this way, America only gives certain privileged people easy roads in life, while others will have to work harder to get to that point in life.…

    • 1071 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Inequalities In America

    • 1049 Words
    • 5 Pages

    America is equal and America is free: is a saying I have heard many times throughout my life as a student. In elementary school, we learned about the American Revolution and the fight for freedom and equality against the British. We learned about the Civil War and the freedom of slaves. We learned about the Industrial Revolution and how people immigrated over to America from Europe and found a better life. We learned about the Civil Rights movement and how the abolishment or Jim Crow lead to the equality of black and white people.…

    • 1049 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The poverty class is not one, definite type of worker who share the same toils and tribulations. Rather, the poverty class is constructed of people, and these people differ in attitudes, circumstance, and troubles just as much as any other economic class. While each author wrote about very different personal experiences of working with the lower class, each made wider conclusions about the same state of poverty in America. These conclusions found strength or weakness in their research, or lack thereof, in their use of generalization, or refusal to generalize, and how they played on the final emotions of the reader. Each author’s conclusions will reside in different readers in different ways.…

    • 2012 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Income inequality has been a progressively growing issue in the United States, even today. The problem dates back all the way to the Great Depression, although some researchers tend to think that it is older than that. The difference between the wealth of higher-income families and lower-income families has become a great issue. Many people, including our government, think that they know how they can fix it. They have tried time and time again to come up with solutions, yet we are still facing the same obstacle that we were almost one hundred years ago.…

    • 1224 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Income inequality is the reason for America’s high influx of wealth to the upper percent of our country. Due to a now misrepresented governmental system, Americans wages and way of life has drastically lowered and as a result, has halted America’s once prestigious influence on the world 's economy. With the American dream far from capable in today 's economy, many question America’s opportunities for people of different backgrounds and countries. In our society the greatest achievement anyone can accomplish is getting the American dream, this however, is a struggle in it’s own.…

    • 1232 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Thesis: America will eventually become a middle-class nation again; it just takes time. America is in a state where two sides are fighting against each other. The middle class wants higher minimum wage and higher paying jobs, while upper class wants lower taxes. Both sides only want what benefits themselves. It's possible for each side to get what they want, but according to Paul Krugman, it's just a matter of time.…

    • 328 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout time income inequality has existed throughout the world. Although, we as Americans have “equal rights and opportunities” to be as successful as the next person, it is difficult to achieve these things while not being paid and treated fairly. Income inequality refers to the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner among a population. In the United States there is a blatant income and social inequality. The reason being is that people in the United States have been so accustomed to the social norms of living comfortably with the wages they make.…

    • 1112 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When a citizen of the United States of America (USA) looks at the USA’s flag, or its Constitution, or its Declaration of Independence, what does he or she see? One person may see and believe in the ideals set forth by the Founding Fathers of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, another person may also see these ideals, but feel fundamentally locked out their attractive promise. These “unalienable rights” (archives 1) seem to construct a society based on the bedrock of equality, so why might one citizen see utopia and another a façade. At the time of the USA’s founding, its slave economies were in full swing, with even the man who penned, “…all men are created equal,” owning hundreds of slaves and…

    • 1088 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In essence, it becomes a vicious cycle of being poor due of the lack of education and low earning wage and then continuing to live on the edge to maintain the essentials of daily life (i.e. car, housing, food, etc). The author further argues that the average middle class or wealthy individual’s wants are simply not an option for the working poor. The author also describes the working poor through some of the common demographics. Throughout his book, Shipler explains and recounts several anecdotes and groups who are living in poverty. Many of these groups include households led my single mothers, minorities, and immigrants.…

    • 1447 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Income Inequality in America Holding the seventh spot among all nations, America is one of the richest, and most diverse countries in the world, with a per capita of $51,248.21 as of 2013. Although being among the wealthiest nations, America still faces a huge significant problem of income inequality, which is considered one of the biggest problems facing its citizens. The nation is more likely to be ruled by richest one percent over the coming decades, as indicated by various expert predictions by The Scientific American and The New York Times . Both predictions pointed out strong arguments of how income inequality engulfs and affects the American population. According to The New York Times, "Politicians and economists might say that America is the greatest country in the world, yet we still are on top of the list of income inequality.”…

    • 1021 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    I think inequality becomes a problem when people no longer have a realistic chance of achieving upwards mobility. The idea of a capitalist society is that we all have a chance to thrive and live a life of plenty if we work hard. I think inequality is a problem in the U.S. today firstly because of the lack of opprotunity for upwards mobility that I just mentioned. There are other clear signs that inequality is a problem.…

    • 126 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    All in all, finances are one major social inequality that impact everyday American…

    • 811 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Social class still matters to America Social class refers to divisions in society based on the money you make, the economy and social status. People who in the same social class typically have the same level of wealth, education, achievement, type of job and income. The American is an open society and social class is still a matter to American today. Social class matters in almost every type of social situation today because it defines who you are in life, how other people treat you, and it also determines whom you hang out with, which school you go to, the type of health condition you are in, and the type of environment you are growing up in. Overall, social class is everything about you.…

    • 1278 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In a capitalistic based economy such as the United States, it creates incomes that are small and large. Having an unequal amount of large or low incomes is called income inequality. Income inequality has become a major problem in the United States, increasing 24% from 1968 to 2012” (Cochran). The gap between the rich and the poor is growing at an ever increasing rate. In the United States the gap is measured by relative poverty, or “being below one-half the nations income” (Cochran).…

    • 1676 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    How often have you ever walked into any urban area and found that everyone was dressed the same? There’s no denying that visible wealth has shaped how our society operates and the power distribution within it. However, it has come to the point where this idea of “visible wealth” has created economic inequality in our society. Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Christakis argue that visible wealth is the primary cause of economic inequality in America. Economic inequality can be defined as the imbalance of wealth in a society, with a large financial gap between the rich and everyone else.…

    • 1864 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays