Income Inequality In America

Income inequality has been an increasing problem for the United States since the 1970s. It has affected the struggle lower socioeconomic classes’ face in American society today. There is an increasing wage gap driving the upper socio-economic class’s earnings higher than ever before and the lower classes’ lower than ever before. Income inequality has affected those that can run for office and those voted into office in American society. There have been social movements that are helping to create change and are encompassing new issues. There is a lot of income inequality in the United States today and it has a long history and it is affecting a large portion of how American society is run today.
The middle and lower classes have been increasingly …show more content…
ere the dot-com crash and the Great Recession because the upper 1% of the United States “recovered fairly quickly” while the lower classes could not recover as quickly and lost a significant percentage of pretax income.⁶ With this in mind, Americans can understand that a small fraction of the United States takes home more than 25%-50% of the income while the rest has to share the other 50-75% of the income.¹ From data shown on inequality.org, the top 0.1% …show more content…
Social movements have been working extremely hard to make the problem of income inequality known and find ways to lower the wage gap. The Other 98 Percent is a social movement that is attempting to come up with practical solutions to aid lower class Americans to rally against the top 1% of the society.³ This group is one of the many talked about on inequality.org that help shed light on the wage gap and solutions to it. Social movements are important to this issue because if everybody was content with the way society worked today there would be many people homeless and not able to live off of what they make in their job. One way to solve this would be to have businesses stop paying CEOs extremely high amounts of money and distribute it to even out the salary that middle and lower class Americans should have after accommodating for inflation. This would keep CEOs and executives at the top 1% of the economy while helping bring the working classes up to fair pay. Another way to help this would be to help the public to gain assets such as stocks and bonds which are helping the top 1% stay the top 1% because of the income produced by their assets. Getting rid of most of the tax loopholes that the rich use to pay less money would significantly help out the economy because it would keep the middle class and lower class from paying unfair amounts of taxes every year. As far as political

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