Analysis: Economic Inequality In America

Economic Inequality in America The Occupy movement gained fame in September 2011 with a slogan that brought together a wide range of people, “We are the 99 percent.” The goal of the group is to get rid of economic inequality throughout the world. The group sparked a change in the way many people look at the way the world is. Wealth inequality is a word used to describe how money and assets are distributed among a group of people, in this specific case, the group of people is the population of people living in the United States. Everyone knows there is economic inequality in America, but the degree of inequality is highly contested. Why inequality is occurring is another topic people can’t seem to agree on, is everyone given an equal chance
Many of the top earners are born into a rich family who are in the top 1 percent and the child has an advantage over children who are not in the top 1 percent. The child who has money is more likely to go to college, and usually a better college than a child with less money. The child who is in the top 1 percent is also more likely to have connections to people who can help them earn money, and stay in the top in adulthood.
Conservatives see the disparity as an incentive to work hard to make it to the top if you’re in one of the bottom groups of earners. Occupy movement activist call for a redistribution of wealth, so there is equality. Conservative groups see redistribution as taking away from people who have worked hard for what they have and giving it to people who have not tried as hard to make money. Some conservatives will go as far to say that income inequality doesn’t exist, but because of the way income is shown on tax forms it appears the earnings are larger than they really
Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist, has said “Widespread education has become the secret to growth. And broadly accessible education is difficult to achieve unless a society has a relatively even income distribution.” According to a December 2010 paper by economists Michael Kumhof and Romain Rancière of the IMF. In the 1920’s when there was a boom in the economy, low wage workers were encouraged to use credit to make up for wages that didn’t keep up with inflations, which than caused large defaults when the economy crashed. And the same thing happened in the 2008 recession. But others say that inequality is a sign of growth, and good for the economy because it causes the hardest working to make it to the top. And they spend more, thus pumping more into the