Poverty Amid Affluence

In a capitalist economy, the top 20% owns most of the nation’s money, leaving the lower and middle class to survive off 7% of the United States’ overall affluence. Our understanding of “ideal” wealth distribution is heavily inaccurate, making us believe that the nation’s money is dispersed in an equitable system, with the bottom 80% and top 20% battling it out for a 50-50 share of 84.9 trillion dollars. In reality, Americans are underestimating the gap between the rich and the rest of the population, because nearly 47 million people are living in poverty, and the elite take more than half of the nation’s earnings in any given year. In a 2011 study conducted by Harvard business professor Mike Norton, and economist Dan Ariely, it was discovered that 92% of Americans “ideal” of what wealth distribution looks like in our nation, was extremely flawed. What we don’t realize, is that the wealth designated to the top 20% in actuality, is the affluence of the top 1%, and the rest of our nation’s people must work 380 times harder than the upper class, to make the same income. This imbalance of the distribution of wealth is not just limited to our nation’s earnings, but also in other areas. For example, most of our wealth is divided up into financial instruments such as, stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, and the top 1% owns half of the stock market, while the bottom 50% only owns half a percent. This is because the upper class can afford to invest, while the lower class is on the verge of poverty, and these large amounts of people are barely scraping by. Wealth inequality is a major issue facing our nation, and it has caused 15% of our nation to live in a state of destitution. Instead of resorting to other means to fix this problem, we should educate ourselves, and realize that wealth distribution in America isn’t as just as we thought it was, and we should work towards a long-term sustainable solution.

– Siya Sharma (10th Grade Student, Santa Clara, CA)

(To leave comments, please click on the title at the top)