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Economic Inequality In The United States

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Chapter seven of American Democracy in Peril has Hudson describing economic inequality, which is both the lack of equality in opportunity, including income mobility, and the diminishing equality of condition present in the United States. Hudson argues that due to wealth and income shifting greatly in favor of the rich at the expense of all other Americans, economic inequality is threatening political equality. I agree with Carnegie’s view on investing in the people rather than hoarding, but Hudson shows that the latter is what the United States has been building to over the last 50 years. Instead of investing in ourselves and improving the standard of living for all, the United States now has less income mobility than the countries people …show more content…
Not only that, but jobs have been leaving the United States due to globalization, deindustrialization, and downsizing. What I have noticed in general from politicians discussing the minimum wage is the value of the jobs themselves, where they justify not increasing the minimum wage due to the diminishing quality of jobs. As Hudson shows, it has less to do with that but more to do with the vanishing safety nets of the past. When the standard of living was rising equally with the rising economy, it worked in both the rich and poor’s favor, but this has now shifted dramatically towards the rich that I had not been aware of. The poorest 20% have seen their income and wealth lowering, while the richest 5% more than doubled, with that same 5% owning two-thirds of the wealth in the United …show more content…
Most concerning is that public policy is both being made both by and for the rich, and it will only get worse as those who are rich tend to get richer, while the poor get poorer. This means that this same influence is only getting more concentrated and is causing Americans to lose their political voice and power. One of the defenses of those who diminish the lacking income mobility is the presence of higher education in order to gain higher employment. However, even with more education, people are still struggling to make as much as the previous generation did with only a high school degree. College also seems to benefit only those who are able to afford it, and overlooks the general population that cannot do so. It has also become less important to be educated, at least at a non-prestigious university, than it is to know the right people, as is suggested in the excerpt from The Power Elite. I also find skill-based technical change to be very concerning. Hudson has made reference to automation sparingly throughout the book, but I feel that it is a great concern to the current workforce. While not all labor will be replaced overnight, many jobs will be lost in the future due to automation, with one example Hudson uses being decently paid bank tellers getting replaced by ATMs. That example is of note because those bank

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