Causes of American Social Inequality

The United States claims to be a land of equal opportunity. However, with every success story that comes from the states there are several more stories of people who not only fail to achieve great fortunes but who never even manage to climb above the poverty line. Though it might seem that taking care of the poor and ensuring their ability to survive so that the opportunities for success that exist within the United States can continue to be available to them would be just one of the many things that makes America great. There is however a considerable amount of resistance against such ideas by those with the most access to America’s power and resources. Though many of these people could make a massive impact on the lives of millions of Americans using only a very small portion of their overall accumulated wealth – thus contributing to the survival and social mobility of the continuously growing number of poor citizens in America – many ultra-rich Americans instead choose to spend their money on increasing the size of the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States.

The documentary film titled “Park Avenue: Money, Wealth, and the American Dream” describes many aspects of America's economic policies and suggests several problems and solutions within it. It focuses much of its attention on an apartment building in New York City on 740 Park Avenue where more ultra-rich Americans live than anywhere else. “The rich here haven't just used their money to buy fancy cars, private jets and mansions. They've also used it to rig the game in their favor” (Gibney, Park Avenue). In an interview with Washington Post correspondent Bob Kaiser that is presented in the “Park Avenue” film Kaiser says that politicians spend a good portion of their time in office “begging for money” on telephones during their time spent both in (and campaigning for) office (Gibney). The film also contains an interview with Jack Abramoff, a Wall Street man who spent almost four years in federal prison for bribing public officials and evading taxes. Abramoff says that “money is being used to buy results. That's the problem. That's how I used money. I knew what I was doing” (Gibney). The film goes on to explain that these “results” often include legislation that assists in the task of stripping government regulations from corporations, the funds for these results coming from owners of the companies who speak openly about the limits government regulations put on them. Billionaires of America are spending huge amounts of money to ensure that American legislation panders to their corporate profit margins.

It becomes increasingly hard to discuss the top one percent's wealth due to a type of rhetoric that is slowly rising in popularity and muddying the waters of reform seeking discourse. This kind of language often calls for the stripping away of government programs and accumulating more tax-free wealth within the hands of a very small number of people, thus appointing them to be wholly responsible for the manner in which society will grow. However, those with the most money in America today have not shown through their actions that they would spend the money that they would accumulate, through the tax-breaks and deregulation they continually lobby for, to fund American society successfully. Instead, they seem far more interested in building an exclusive life raft for those of them with similarly sized amounts of wealth, abandoning those who cannot afford admittance.

There is a continuous crusade being somewhat successfully carried out by the ultra-rich to end any and all government spending on what they refer to as “entitlements.” This word choice is intentionally used in order to influence audiences into associating the supposedly growing population of welfare recipients as the kind of people who merely live to take, never contributing to society in any meaningful way. Yet, who are the people in society who seems most likely to feel that they are “entitled” to special treatment? Is it the people living below the poverty line who are unable to financially support themselves and their families, or is it the people who feel that they are already having far too much taken away from them when they happen to already have access to more opulence and luxury than most people could ever imagine?

There is a rising trend in the American political climate that has begun to popularize the usage of rhetoric that dismisses the poor as victims of their own apathy and laziness. By normalizing these kinds of statements within American politics the wealthiest of citizens are able to protect themselves from public scrutiny that might chastise them for refusing to contribute to the society that they have benefited from so heartily. The first thing that must be done in order to properly discuss the currently existing economic inequality that plagues the United States is to first set about dismissing the stigma that is so often linked to impoverished and struggling citizens. Far too often Americans are told that the people who are collecting government assistance are only doing so because they have their sights set on achieving a “free ride.” Repeatedly it is stated, primarily through right-wing media outlets, that the hard work of middle-class America is being siphoned by a “dependent class,” and that by dismantling programs that support these people, the dependent class will have no other choice but to get off of their parents' couches and go fill out job applications. The usage of this kind of discourse is allowing legislation to be passed that, little by little, is stripping away the cash and food assistance that many impoverished families depend on in order to survive. Programs such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA; P.L. 104-196) implement a sort of rhetoric that suggests that the only reason people are collecting welfare or food stamps is because they refuse to participate and find employment for themselves. “The legislation [of the PRWORA] does not mention reducing poverty and its structural causes (e.g., income inequality, discrimination in the labor market, racism, and sexism)" (Bullock and Lock, 149). Instead of attempting to fix kinks in the American economic system that perpetuate poverty and disparity, this program focuses on making recipients of government assistance jump through a growing assortment of hoops in order to receive the benefits that might assure their survival.

Now of course nobody wishes for lazy people to take advantage of government systems that have been initially put into place in order to keep alive those who are truly in need, but in order to weed out those who may in fact lack ambition there are few options other than to also lump in the children and elderly whose lives depend on the government's help. It may seem logical to make receiving government assistance more difficult in order to make sure that only those who really need it get it, but there are other ways of making sure that people who are asking for help really need it.

Limiting welfare in order to end poverty is like shutting down hospitals in order to end cancer. Welfare is a symptom of a problem, not the source of the disease itself. By suggesting that the poor are in the boat they're in because of a lack of effort on their own part is just one of the ways that attention and blame are turned away from the systems that create poverty and places it upon the victims of these inequalities. Also consider that it may seem, to those in poverty, a much more logical choice to stay at home and collect a welfare check instead of seeking out employment that will essentially only serve to rob them of hours that they might otherwise be able to spend with their children or families – and for what? Is an hour of life truly worth only $7.25? Many company wages tend to be smaller than the amount that a person might have collected from the government while staying put. Even if this is not true one must consider the fact that in order to maintain a job a person must often have access to amenities that are scarce without money, such as reliable transportation or daycare for children during working hours. “Park Avenue” states that “1 in 7 Americans receive food stamps” and that “forty one percent of recipients live in working households” (Gibney). Since more than half of food stamp recipients are either children or elderly, and since nearly half of the recipients are currently employed, where exactly is the so called “dependent” class of loafers? Perhaps, instead of demeaning those who depend on Link cards and welfare benefits in order to survive, an effort should be made on part of American legislators to consider the issues within the marketplace that these people encounter when attempting to get out of the rut of poverty they are stuck within.

The rut of poverty is becoming deeper and wider every year while the mountain of wealth is becoming taller and narrower. “Between 1979 and 1997, the after-tax income of the poorest 20% of U.S. households decreased by $100..., whereas the top 1% of households enjoyed an increase of 157% in their after-tax income..." (Bullock and Lock, 147). So, while minimum wage workers lost a hundred dollars of their already minimal yearly incomes, the richest of the rich had several extra hundreds of thousands of additional dollars added to their already immensely inflated pay. “The top 20% of the population now owns 83.6% of the country's wealth, whereas 16.4% is shared by the remaining 80% of the population (Kiester and Moller, 2000)" (Bullock and Lock 150). “Park Avenue” cites that 400 people at the very top of the economic ladder own as the bottom half of Americans (Gibney). All the while, stigmatization of the poor has become more prevalent.

An article by Peter Taylor Goosby, titled “Why Do People Stigmatize the Poor at a Time of Rapidly Increasing Inequality, and What Can Be Done About It?” cites studies done in the UK instead of the United States. However, the studies observe a similar behavior in those living upon the upper crust of the wealth in the UK, citing the problem of stigmatized poor in the US as being more extreme (Goosby, 34). Nonetheless, the findings show a decrease in the amount of moral support that the poor are getting from the public. “The proportion agreeing that government should 'spend more ... on the poor, even if it leads to higher taxes' has steadily declined since 1993, from over half to just 27 per cent in 2009, with a 2 per cent increase by 2011" (Goosby, 34). It seems odd to think that in light of waning economic opportunities the most commonly shared sentiment about the situation is that the poor people are sucking the country dry with their welfare checks. Never mind the trillions of dollars that the United States has spent supplying the endless war in the Middle East for deficit growth, or the fact that those with the most financial power are using their power to rig the game instead of use the game in any kind of helpful or constructive way?

Such things as costly wars can be avoided, but in many cases poverty cannot. Injury, pregnancy, loss of a loved one or plain bad luck can all be causes of somebody’s decline into poverty. And yet day after day there are people who say that government programs only breed dependency, doing much more harm than good. An article titled “Capitalism, Social Mobility, and Distributive Justice” and written by David Rubinstein describes how the social class that somebody is born might have an impact on where they end up economically later on. It does happen to make a point of supporting the capitalist system's embrace of competition, saying that “the inheritance of unequal chances seems so unfair that it is sometimes used to reject even otherwise legitimate inequalities” (Rubinstein), which may be a vital key to bridging the rhetorical gap between different economic groups.

For example, when politicians lament that welfare programs are supposedly creating an ever-growing “dependent class” they are basing their argument on what is called a “slippery slope argument.” The slippery slope argument is in some cases referred to as an argumentative fallacy, meaning an argument that might gain popularity and yet still lacks legitimate backing. In an article written by Wibren van der Burg analyzing this kind of argument it is suggested within it that the slippery slope argument is a refuge that those with no actual evidence defensively revert back to in the face of well-supported arguments (Burg). Despite the fact that those with a background in ethics and logic might be able to point out these kinds of argumentative discrepancies, these arguments are still capable of taking hold in the minds of the public as if it were fact. And it is possible that those speaking them truly believe the things that they are saying. However, in order to make progress in the ongoing discourse of America’s future, policy makers must learn to set aside rash generalizations – also known as prejudices – about entire groups of people.

An article written by Lisa Miller and titled “The Money-Empathy Gap” discusses a social experiment that was conducted by sociologists who wanted to research the way that money effects the way that people interact with one another. By setting up an extremely one-sided game of Monopoly the attitudes of the person set up to succeed in the game became observably arrogant as the fixed game progressed. What this suggests is that even when somebody knows for a fact that their opponents are set up to fail they will still feel that they are superior to those who are losing. “‘Putting someone in a role where they’re more privileged and have more power in a game makes them behave like people who actually do have more power, more money, and more status,’ says Paul Piff, the psychologist who designed the experiment” (Miller). If the findings of this study are accurate then it may explain the attitudes of the ultra-rich towards the very poor. Regardless of the privileges that these people might have been born into it is likely that they see themselves as somewhat deserving of the opulent lifestyles that they enjoy. It is also likely that they see any efforts to give other people the option of moving upwards on the economic ladder as somehow cheapening the sweetness of their victory by rendering it more attainable by the “losers” of society. They doubtlessly feel that unless somebody is able to access and utilize the free-market system in order to benefit them then that person is undeserving of a step up.

Most Americans aren’t trying to live on 740 Park Avenue. They’re simply trying to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. Perhaps it is easier to blame the impoverished for the current shape of America’s economy because there are so many of them and they are not hard to find. They probably don't have speech writers and they may not even smell very good. It might be easy to claim that these people don’t contribute to society because they have no jobs to pay taxes through or money to spend and help stimulate the economy with. However, by following the money that’s spent by the ultra-rich it can be seen that these people do not seem entirely interested in contributing to society any more than they absolutely have to, and if they can lower that mandatory obligation to the state then they seem anxious to do exactly that. Overall, the economic injustice that persist in the United States is not necessarily caused by any one thing, but when taking note of the resistance to helping the needy that those in the position to do so exemplify then one might go on to investigate how the rich and powerful might have helped create the millions of impoverished families that continue to struggle to survive in a game that’s being rigged against them.

Works Cited

Bullock, Heather and Bernice Lock. "Building a Research and Advocacy Agenda on Issues of Economic Justice." Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2001: 147-162.

Burg, Wibren van der. “The Slippery Slope Argument.” Ethics, Oct 1991: 42-65.

Miller, Lisa. "The Money-Empathy Gap." New York, Jul. 2012.

Rubenstien, David. "Capitalism, Social Mobility, and Distributive Justice." Social Theory & Practice. Florida State University.

Taylor-Goosby, Peter. "Why Do People Stigmatize the Poor at a Time of Rapidly Increasing Inequality, and What Can Be Done About It?" The Political Quarterly, January-March 2013: 31-42.