One For All, All For One
We’ve all heard it before. The United States, a land of “Opportunity,” where people can achieve wealth through hard work and perseverance. Sadly, that doesn’t happen, not to the degree that many people wish. There are three defined classes, lower, middle, and upper, like in many other countries. The problem in the US is that the distribution of money is quite frankly absurd, with the top 20% richest people holding over 80% of wealth, while the bottom 40% doesn’t even hold 5%. This results in many in the lower class to rely on food stamps and government funding. And it isn’t their fault. People in the lower class usually work longer and harder than those in the middle or upper class, and fail to move forwards at all. Many are held back due to lack of educational opportunities, but even people who grew up educated as middle class can fall into poverty and become trapped.
Mary Lee has experienced this first hand. She has a college education, and was a middle class worker for years before her job was suddenly outsourced. This led to loss of her house, and then she had to begin dealing with health problems (a relative’s and her own). She now either couch surfs or lives out of a car, and has to eat mainly Top Ramen, something she never used to eat. She is under terrible stress, “like falling in the ocean and treading water for years with no real ladder to a ship to get out and get stable and warm.”
Lim, Dominica, and Mary Lee. "'I feel rich when I have food.' Stories from the
Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) is an organization centered around dealing with these sorts of financial ridiculosities. PRRAC’s main focus is “to help connect advocates with social scientists working on [...] poverty issues,” and to coordinate solutions to inequality problems based on research that it sponsors. PRRAC has received donations from hundreds of people, along with other groups that have some similar ideals. They have active and studious projects going, all in the interest of people suffering poverty or similar situations.
Income inequality is serious, and is worth far more attention than it currently gets. Many people live in conditions that are as bad as Mary Lee, or even worse. The bottom 1% of citizens actually has a negative net worth, meaning that the value of their many debts outstrips their income. Someone needs to make changes to marketing laws and regulations, to allow lower class people to work their way upward, and increase the class mobility that the US is fabled to have. This has to change eventually, so why not start now?
Works Cited
War on Poverty." Aljazeera America. N.p., 15 Jan. 2014. Web. 17 Mar. 2016. <http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/1/15/stories-from-thewaronpoverty.html>. (First Story on page)
"PRRAC: Connecting Research to Advocacy." Poverty & Race Research Action Council. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2016. <http://www.prrac.org/about.php>.