Thomas Paine: An Analysis Of Social Classes In America

In America, looking from the outside in, it is hard to fathom how the government runs with so many different people, religions, ethnicities, and cultures. According to Thomas Paine, the new world does an exemplary job at keeping everything in “cordial unison.” Paine claims that in America “the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged….Their taxes are few, because their government is just; and as there is nothing to render them wretched, there is nothing to engender riots and tumults.” U.S. citizens would love to believe that this is true, but what is not always visible from the outside, is the fact that the American government does not always work that well. Some people might refer to America as “the land of the free,’’ or “the home of the brave.” There is nothing free about the U.S. having the highest prison population in the world. There is nothing free about the LGBTQ community being hated upon and hospitalized day after day. There is nothing brave about a rapist only getting three months when he should be facing fifteen years. There is nothing brave about 194 black people being killed due to trigger happy police in 2016 alone. Paine states that
Individually, the U.S. has the one percent of Upper Class, the thirty percent of the Upper Middle Class, the thirty two percent of the Middle Class, the seventeen percent of the Lower Middle Class, and lastly, the overwhelming twenty percent of the poor. Now lets specifically look at that top one percent and the bottom twenty percent. How is it that one percent of America controls fifty percent of the national currency, and twenty percent controls a small fraction of it? A major reason for this is due to the rich influencing a specific idea or creating legislation for wealthy politicians in return for a large payoff. If a person were to look at Paine’s quote, “There, the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged,” he/she would be in great