post #4

Economic inequality will affect our society

In essay “who built the pyramids?”, the author Studs Terkel interviewed Mike Lefebvre who was a steel worker. His feelings and his story reveal a great deal of a typical life of a working class man: Mike was a very hard worker and he could not spent enough time with his family; Yet he was not satisfied with his work because he felt he couldn’t gained little respect for his work. He put his hop on his son. However, in the film “Born rich” we have learned people who were born with wealth live totally different kind of life ; they could get almost anything they wanted without working; they knew nothing about working class people. They only care about how to enjoy their lives with their unlimited money. I think economic inequality is affecting the society as a whole as well as individual families. Under the current system, as the middle class, they will easily lost their property, and their children also easily to lost their opportunities to finished college. Therefore, the increasing gap of the economic status between the rich and the poor will push our society forward to the instability direction.
As a main part of our society, the working class will decide to our society stability. Our society is composed many different individual family, however, in order to survive, many families have no choice to work long hours or work 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. Working is not luxury for them; they are trying to put food on the table, and trying to pay for the rent or keep up the mortgage payment. But, today still more and more families in debt or bankruptcy. Especially when people get sick, couldn’t go to work, and plus they don’t have health insurance. It is easier to bankruptcy. According to Paul Krugman, in “confronting inequality” that “the number of families filing for bankruptcy each year was five times its level in the early 1980s.“ (325) It means that more and more middle class will lose their jobs and homes, then drop down. That is a big problem because our society will have more and more poor people. Moreover, government policies in the past thirty years had encouraged the social disparity; so, a lot of middle classes get frustrated by the society and the system. Some of them think that violent is the only solution to solve the problem. As Mike read,“ violent in American” (xxxvi). Our society will become a heaven of violent, so nobody can feel safety.

post: inequality in the U.S

In the last 30 years, government cut tax rates for rich people more than the middle class and poor families. It increases economic inequality that the wealthy gets wealthier and the poor gets poorer.The health bill that President Obama signed into law will reverse that trend. In this bill, the government will increase tax rates for rich people , and cut medicare subsidies for private insurers to expand its benefits for middle class and poor families. The health bill will cover 95 percent of people, and help many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. Its benefits also flow mostly to middle class households who make less than four times the poverty level--$88,200 for a family of four people. The health reform would "mark a new season in America" because it not only reduces inequality in health care, but also attacks economic inequality of the Reagan era. As we know , government policy and market forces both contributed to increasing inequality since the Reagan era. President Obama think that the Reagan administration had gone too far, America need to have a new trajectory, the old theory that trickle-down economic growth did not work for ordinary people; government should create bottom-up economic growth. Therefore, the health reform will push other things to shift and find a proper balance between the market and the government. The health reform is just the a start of a new beginning.