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.