The Great Divide

The Great Divide

This article gave in-depth insight of the issues facing the Unites States in disparity between the economic classes. It is amazing and alarming to know that the United States has the biggest disparity between all major industrialized countries. This is another notch on the record of the U.S. you would think they don’t want to hold. We are already far behind similar nations when it comes to education. We are also behind less fiscally stable countries when it comes to our health care systems. Why is it that America holds on to this “rich get richer and poor get poorer” mentality? Up until recent years it has seemed that the middle class would have a chance to slightly shorten the gap in regards to income. Today it seems as if the line that divides the middle class from the poor or rich has become blurred and most have seemingly slid into the poor classification.

The article states that “Apologists for the status quo argue that such inequality is necessary to generate investment and reward risk-taking, thereby creating a prosperous economy” (Moberg, 2008). But these seems to only allow a certain class to have a “prosperous” ecomony. The voices that look to combat this inequality are drowned out by the conservative agenda to keep the revenue stream in the hands of the wealthy who in turn pay relatively less are the same in taxes. So how does the middle class gain an upperhand or even keep it’s place in America’s econocmic class? It seems difficult for that to occur when in 1989 the top 1 pecent of U.S. households controlled 39 percent of the nations’s “marketable wealth” (that is, real estate, securities an so on) and 48 percent of the financial wealth (Moberg, 2008). So the rich is obtaining a vast amount of the U.S. wealth and has been trending upward. NYU professor Edward Wolfe states “Keeping wages low has caused property income and stock prices to increase, which has shown up in the increased wealth and income of th rich” (Moberg, 2008). So...