Overview
In the current society, wealth is considered as measure of power in which the people with the most wealth also have access to power and the ones with lesser wealth are stuck at the bottom of food chain. In the United States, the distribution of wealth is immensely unbalanced, but Americans strongly believes that wealth is evenly distributed among the people. If that is the case, then the United States shouldn’t be a Federal country in the first place; it could have been a Socialists state where there is no social divide in terms of wealth. However, it’s just a hypothetical assumption that relates to the wrong notion of justice equality on income and wealth. A lot of people are blinded to the truth that the country’s current system can never champion equality because the manifestations of social divide between the rich and poor is evident everywhere. The can-afford is willing to buy a cup of coffee that is worth a day’s meal for a homeless. Others would spend thousands for a fancy one-night stay at Hilton or Four Season’s, but across the street are people scraping to get by from paycheck to paycheck just to avoid being evicted from their homes.
The Ugly Truth
The numbers suggests a lot of skeptical ideas, first is that if the 1% rich Americans own 70% of America’s wealth, therefore, they have the power to control 99% of Americans in terms of manipulating price, demand, stocks, social structure and even justice. There is only one in every one thousand Americans that can be considered rich, the concentration of wealth on the top 1% is so immense that the it can only be explained by comparing a CEO’s one month paycheck equivalent to a factory worker’s one year salary. Twenty years ago the top 1% represents 33% of the country’s wealth and the bottom 80% holds 18% of Americas wealth. Twenty years later, the subject of debate in wealth inequality got even more intense as the former 18% of the average American’s wealth dwindled to just 11.1% and the top 1% got richer as they now have 35% of America’s distributed wealth. The unmentioned numbers here represent the middle class Americans who also increased in number from 1983 receiving 47% of the distributed wealth to now 53%, which explains the so-called rise of the middle class. The numbers can be summed up to a simple realization, that the rich got richer and the poor got even poorer. Therefore, justice and equality under the free market system does not work in favor of the many.
What is it all about?
Looking further into the statistical reports, it also reveals that the gap in wealth is attributed to several factors such age, gender and race. In general, the country is facing the reality of increasing gender and race disparities. Overall, male dominates the scale as the highest earning gender despite the considerable progress in academia as more women passed men in masters and doctorate attainment. However, gender discrimination suggests the discrepancies in income because of the idea that women are susceptible to stress breakdown due to the belief that women’s emotional nature affects the outcome of their job performance. In addition, a majority of career women are not amenable to travel during relocation and works fewer hours because of their domestic obligations. On the other hand, teenagers working under minimum pay prefers to stay employed rather than attending college because of the need for money, but such decision leads to them being confined to the minimum wage sector for the rest of their life due to lack of academic qualification for high-paying careers.
In terms of race, African-Americans are still affected by the long history of discrimination as they normally depicted by media as less desirable preference for a productive employee. This is because of the fact that African-American race is often associated to criminal acts and that racial bias between whites and black is still eminent until this day. Overall, the disparity in race median income suggests that Asian Americans earns even better than most Caucasians. However, the most affected race in terms of justice and equality are the Hispanics particularly females. This is because of the long battle for the legality of residence of Hispanics in the country considering the immigration issues suggesting large number of illegal immigrants from South America flocking to United States for a taste of the American dream. However, the issue of illegal immigration hinders the chance for most Hispanics to acquire a better job resulting to a very low share of wealth in the U.S.
How things should have been?
The next question here is “what people really deserve?” Under the principles of humanity and ethical existence, people deserve an equal opportunity on the fruits of his land like a farmer deserving of an equal share of his harvest. In economic context, all people pay taxes, but still one lives a more glamorous life than the other and the state provides him more ways to further that claim for wealth while the other lives like a dog that feeds from the scraps of its master’s dinner. The United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that all human beings have equal rights to live a decent life, but it is something easier said than done. If the current open market system opens a vast opportunity for growth, then everyone should have the equal right to claim for a share of the pie, but the pie is not something that is given away easily and only those that has wealth and power can dictate who gets what and who gets which. The country moves along the waves of globalization that in return fuels the free market system. However, that system creates the divide at the same time. If the United States continues to depend on global economy, international trade and foreign policies as a tool for progress, therefore, justice and equality could not be achieved in the free market system.
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