Many problems are being shown and expressed in America today. One of these problems is amongst the classes in society. I believe there are major problems amongst the classes, but most importantly the middle class, which include many different solutions for fixing these problems in the class. In the article “Six Policies to Help the Middle Class with No Cost to Taxpayers”, it was stated that the elected new officials should be in charge of strengthening the middle class. Since 1968, the value of minimum wage has declined by more than 31%. Rather than make excessive short term budget cuts, we need to make investments in the middle class, an example would be expanding access to preschool and child care. The cost of living in America is rising, while the incomes are staying the same or falling. With this being said, middle class is risking falling behind more and more economically. Our economic growth is shifting due to our middle class. The middle class is becoming more and more in danger, but there are ways to fix the issues. The first step would be to increase minimum wage, instead of having workers take on more hours just to survive on the pay they make. Also, providing and offering paid sick days to ALL United State workers. If sick days were offered, the benefits would include the reduction of work turnovers, and …show more content…
To help this problem, if we focus on building more homes, prices will go down because the supply is higher. This eases housing expenses for the middle class. Also, if we raise the tax on the rich there would be more money distributed by the government. We need to decrease government's social safety net, but increase the amount of people involved in Union. Unions were beneficial in the 20th century, and could be just as much today. These things could also keep a more structured midle
I consider my family and I to be in the middle class category and from being in the middle class, and the facts that are provided, the middle class is slowly declining as the time goes on. I believe that a lot of people go beyond the middle class to the upper middle class or people go below the middle class to the poor category. I’ve found a graph from Forbes that compares the rates of all classes from 1979 to 2014. From observing the graph my initial hypothesis was right. The middle class has declined by 6.8% between the years 1979-2014.
Growing up in The United States, people are given this idea of an American Dream. Almost every child is raised to believe they can become and do anything they want to do, if one works hard enough. However, a majority of people believe that there is a separation of class in American society. Gregory Mantsios author of “Class in America-2009” believes that Americans do not exchange thoughts about class division, although most of people are placed in their own set cluster of wealth. Also political officials are trying to get followers by trying to try to appeal to the bulk of the population, or the middle class, in order to get more supporters. An interesting myth that Mantsios makes in his essay is how Americans don’t have equal opportunities.
The working class stays working and the middle class stays being middle. Author Nick Tingle, wrote “The vexation of class”, he argues that the working class and the middle class are separated educationally based on culture and the commonplace. Tingle uses his own personal experiences and Ethos, to effectively prove his point about the difference in class based on culture ; although, Tingle also falls short by adding unnecessary information throughout the article that weakens his belief entirely.
Mantsios believes that Americans do not like to talk about the different classes, whether it is about the upper, middles or lower class. He outlines four myths that are widely held about class in the United States. Myth one the united states is fundamentally a classless society, myth two we are, essentially a middle class nation. Most Americans have achieved relative affluence in what is widely recognized as a consumer society. Myth three we are all getting richer. Each generation propels itself to greater economic well-being. And myth four, everyone has an equal chance to succeed. Requires no more than hard work sacrifice and perseverance (Mantsios).
(p1) Broadly speaking, class is about economic and social inequality… (p6) We have a tendency for groups of advanced people to congregate together, and groups of disadvantaged people to congregate so that inequalities persist from generation to generation.
With each class comes a certain level in financial standing, the lower class having the lowest income and the upper class having the highest income. According to Mantsios’ “Class in America” the wealthiest one percent of the American population hold thirty-four percent of the total national wealth and while this is going on nearly thirty-seven million Americans across the nation live in unrelenting poverty (Mantsios 284-6). There is a clear difference in the way that these two groups of people live, one is extreme poverty and the other extremely
The working class stay working and the middle class stay being middle. Author Nick Tingle, wrote “The vexation of class”, he argues that the working class and the middle class are separated based on culture and the commonplace. Tingle uses his own personal experiences and Ethos, to effectively prove his point about the difference in class; although, Tingle also falls short by adding unnecessary information throughout the article that weakens his belief entirely.
Plus this kills off many small businesses trying to get on their feet, before they can even begin to stand a chance. The reason that there is a few rich, and many poor, and no middle class at this time, is because they would crush all competition as they started. It makes it so it is the very rich, and the very poor, and that is it. It may be said, that the very wealthy should be rich, and from their kindness they create jobs for the poor, in his book “Wealth”, Carnegie states “This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth… … To provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him.”(Carnegie 426). He states that the poor depend on the rich for jobs, and that their helping the poor to slowly gain wealth. His statement is flawed however, he is very biased, as he is one of the rich, and he does not know, nor acknowledge the point of view of the worker, who are underpaid to the point where they cannot get ahead. In addition if this helped the poor, then there would be no need for children to work, yet they
The largest group in America is facing extinction. We are talking of course about the American middle class. In 1971 the American middle class population was 36% higher than the population of the lower class. However, today the middle class population is now only 22% higher than the lower class (McDill). This is only a 14% drop spread over 44 years. The major issue here is that while the middle class shrinks, the upper and lower classes are growing. Financial experts believe that soon the middle class will become nonexistent and America will be divided into two extremes, poverty and wealth. This issue has become so severe that the United States government has stepped in and created a “middle class task force” passed as part of the government “stimulus package” of 2009. However most experts including Kent McDill of the millionaires’ corner, Doyle McManus of the LA Times, Erik Kain of Forbes magazine believe that the government’s program is putting a knife in the middle class. They believe this because the government is taxing businesses until they are forced to leave America and go overseas. This, along with the rise of mechanical workers and ignorance of the issues facing the middle class led to the decreasing job market. Jobs in America will soon be split into either very high paying upper class jobs or very low paying jobs. This makes the job market a hit or miss in America. It is predicted that America will soon be either very rich or very poor with no middle ground.
Furthermore it creates a rhetoric that states it is the responsibility of the middle class to change the circumstances of those in need. This makes those in the middle class have a pressure they did not choose, and also those in poverty an expectation that they might not otherwise have had. Other than when Beegle states, “If the teacher had been exposed to Poverty 101, she would have the skills needed to find out what motivators made sense to me (342),” she makes no other suggestions on just how exactly the middle class would end the cycles of
Gregory Mantsios advocates more on the struggle to proceed from one class to another in his essay-“Class in America”. Mantsios states that, “Class standing has a significant impact on our chances for survival....
While the the 1%, are secured, no one is addressing the rest of the people. As the economy flourishes, housing, higher education and health care, and child care increases with it to the point where 30 percent of a person’s income goes towards housing. People are finding it impossible to purchase a house with their middle class incomes. People begin to fall out of the once stable middle class because too much is needed to be sacrificed in order to live in a stable home. In the shrinking middle class, “40% or more of the residents live below the poverty
...elp the working middle class from falling into poverty or to help the working poor rise out of poverty. Furthermore the working poor themselves lack the knowledge and power to demand reform. David Shipler says it best when he writes, “Relief will come, if at all, in an amalgam that recognizes both the society’s obligation through government and business, and the individual’s obligation through labor and family —and the commitment of both society and individual.” (Shipler 5786-5788) It is time for America to open its eyes and see the invisible working poor.
In his essay “Land of Opportunity” James W. Loewen details the ignorance that most American students have towards class structure. He bemoans the fact that most textbooks completely ignore the issue of class, and when it does it is usually only mentions middle class in order to make the point that America is a “middle class country. This is particularly grievous to Loewen because he believes, “Social class is probably the single most important variable in society. From womb to tomb, it correlates with almost all other social characteristics of people that we can measure.” Loewen simply believes that social class usually determine the paths that a person will take in life. (Loewen 203)
Consequently, limiting the spending capacity of the middle class damages the entire economy because it is the middle class that generates the most economic activity. For example, one wealthy person does not need to buy 5,000 new cars, but 5,000 families could certainly aid in stabilizing the auto-industry. Simply put, the extremely rich do not spend enough of their money to sustain an entire economic system. Unfortunately, the trend of lowering taxes for the rich continued under the next presidencies. Interestingly, under the Clinton administration, taxes on the rich were raised, and as a result, we saw the economy stabilize (Hartmann). However, under George Bush Jr., taxes on the rich were once again lowered. This time around, unearned income was now greatly untaxed as well. Lower taxes on unearned income is what enabled billionaires to only pay a 15% tax rate on federal taxes compared to the average American who could pay as much as 30%. Ergo, this cut in taxes led to yet another recession in 2008. Through these trends, we see that when the rich are paying their appropriate shares inequality due to recessions, for example, are generally at their