Americans Are Frustrated With Today's Economy

Steve Jobs is the co-founder of Apple and owns 80% of Pixar which is worth $1 billion. Steve jobs had a rough start at first, as stated in Steve Jobs: An Extraordinary Career. Now, "Apple says it has sold more than 300 million iPods, over 100 million iPhones and more than 15 million iPad devices. They has sold billions of songs from its iTunes." This demonstrates just by starting small and by working hard, one can access their American Dream. Another example is Shelly Comer. She is a divorced mother of three who as well takes care of her friend's oldest child, Michelle. The twist is that Michelle wants to go to college and because of that Shelly "is going into debt so that Michelle can go to college. Shelly has worked her whole life-," as stated in Is The American Dream Still Possible?. Michelle has six small scholarships, took out a federal loan, and also works 16 hours a week in the financial aid office at the university she is attending at. Yet her and Shelly are struggling to get money to pay for Michelle's university. This shows that people do have access to their American Dream, but just because they are both struggling to get financial aid, Michelle is still going to her university so she can have a better quality of life. This demonstrates that people have access to their American

Many citizens, most of them conservatives, have questioned the economic recovery, but evidences have dismissed their arguments. President Obama pointed out that “we do have real, tangible evidences of our progress;” for example, we have created “10.9 million new jobs”

In specific, President Obama sought to assert his commitment in supporting economic recovery as well as growing the middle class in the United States. It follows the adverse economic conditions and thus, president Obama promised to offer liberation for the American families. Still, President Obama also used the speech to emphasize on his policies going forward including his foreign policy which

Obama believes that the government plays a central role in helping everyone to deal with critical challenges. This is because its effects are far reaching and having an adverse impact on middle class Americans. Moreover, there is less opportunity for young adults who go to college and earn degrees. Yet, they are finding a job market that is unwilling to hire them. To deal with the issues, the President believes that Washington should have a stimulus program that is focused on: improving job growth, reducing taxes on the middle class, encouraging small businesses to innovate, supporting state / local governments and discourages outsourcing. (Killough, 2012)

“No one has been hurt more under the Obama economy than young people, than Hispanics, than African Americans, than single moms,”

In which he addressed the riots and protest that occurred the previous year and acknowledged that their was in fact a problem in this country with regards to Income inequality and in this case more specifically minimum wage. He stated that he believed that it wasn’t fair that in America which is one of the most affluent countries in the world that someone may work full-time and still have to live in poverty. So with this in mind President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage to $10.10 which is more that a dollar more than what he proposed last year ($9). This change was also much more greatly supported by Democrats than republicans. This can be shown because in a recent poll 90% of Democrats say that they would support this change vs. just 53% of Republicans that say they would support this

In ”Why the Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer” Robert Reich talks about the growing gap of higher class and the lower class of today’s society. He states that the rich are getting richer because they are the ones trying to take over the lower paying jobs.Along with that, the poor are getting poorer because of many losing their jobs due to competition with other countries because they are willing to work for less money. With today’s society it is common to replace low paying jobs with machines that end up cheaper and more efficient. Reich uses a metaphor to describe how the economy is doing for the rich and poor. This essay is informational and mature. In choosing this topic, Reich was reaching out to the older audiences by using

“The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that between 1979 and 2007, the imbalance in income has more than tripled between the top 1 percent of the population and the majority” (Reich). After federal taxes and transfer payments, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 275 percent, while it rose less than 40 percent for the middle, working, and lower classes and only 18 percent for the under-class. “According to the Census Bureau, average household incomes have been declining, while the income of the wealthiest 1 percent has risen by 31 percent. Economist, Emmanuel Saez, has estimated that about 95 percent of all economic gains since the recovery of the 2008 recession have gone to the top 1 percent” (Reich).

One of the economic issues we see today in the United States is the unemployment rate. In the article "Why doesn't 4.9% unemployment feel great?" by Heather Long, she explains why even though unemployment rate has decreased, people still are not satisfied. For the first time since the great great recession in 2008, the employment rate has fallen below 5% in the United States. Obama says he does not get enough credit for creating 14 million jobs, and that we should be proud how long we have come after the biggest economic crisis since the 1930's. Long also refers to Bernie Sanders, a democratic candidate for the U.S. presidential election in 2016, who says that the economy is "rigged," and that the real rate is higher than 5% (Heather Long, "Why doesn't 4.9% unemployment feel great?").

After watching the video Wealth Inequality in America (2012) and reading the article Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but short on Pay by David Segal (2012), I started reflecting on how blind we have become to the conception of America’s growing economy. While the social stratification is an ideal ladder, for the poor to middle classes to seek for economical growth to reach the top, the wealth class. There’s a misconception on how corporations are helping society’s economic growth. While growing in value for its shareholders, corporations are rising inequality among the workplace. The reality of an uneven economy is notorious for the poor, yet its magnitude is not imaginable by many. President Barack Obama has tried to address this issue with a proposal of raising

Today in America, there is a specific class of people who are slowly dwindling away into nonexistence. These people had a dream, the American Dream, they dreamed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For some people, this dream was broken down into having a white picket fence with 2.5 kids, a house, and a car. However, today these people are not dreaming they are hoping; hoping to get through another day by making ends meet. These people—which are the core pillar holding up the American Dream—are a part of the middle class Americans. The middle class in America has been on a quick decline in recent years; in order to restore the middle class America will have to reshape our economic structure by lowering the deficit on the middle

America, where the famous so-called “American Dream” was born, used to be the most influential nation in the world economy. However, since the Second World War, America’s economy has been in a free-fall. The “American Dream” is now only a remnant of long lost heydays. The reason why America has gotten to this dreadful situation may lie in the path that its government chose to develop. For instance, the truly needy do not have enough support from the Social Safety Net programs to get out of poverty: the tax systems should be progressive instead of regressive; wages and benefits are not equally allocated among the workers and the bosses, and there has been no attention to the maintenance and improvement of infrastructure for a very long time. In order to alter the unpleasant-big-picture of poverty and inequality, America needs better funding for the safety net programs, restructuring of the tax system, adjusting wages and benefits for both employers and employees so they can maintain their jobs and pay their bills, and ensuring that the federal government pay more attention to the development of infrastructure along the way.

This “middle-class nation” is struggling to support all those who live in its borders and the misconceptions about wealth are vastly overrated. Furthermore, the idea of wealth and stability is incorrect, and there is a very sharp contrast between the rich and poor in the country. As the richest twenty percent of American hold ninety percent of the total household of the total household wealth in the country, those at the bottom have managed very poorly and suffer to get through the days.

After the worst collapse and weakest recovery, many Americans seem eager to listen to the Sanders critique of wealth distribution or Trump’s argument against trade. Families are skeptical of claims that the recession is over or that the US has recovered. They feel that they haven’t recovered are or worse off than they were before. According to Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, it’s an inconsistency between what is actually happening in their everyday lives and what they’re hearing which is why people are so angry. Trump and Sanders are using that anger to challenge the management of America’s economy at a more fundamental level than other candidates.

Over the past few decades, the “American Dream” vision has been quickly vanishing as a result of the increasing troubles and weakening of the middle class. It has lost the view of being the most successful and wealthy middle class in the world, while the middle classes in other countries are excelling in earning higher middle and lower class incomes. The issue of the declining wealth of the middle class explains a huge problem in the United States’ future prosperity and well being for the citizens and the country. There are many issues that affect the success of the middle and lower classes, such as structural differences in the economy, culture, and government. The gap between the middle and high classes is increasing specifically. The United States has the image of giving people life and prosperity, but inequality is increasing significantly due to issues in education, decrease in taxation among the upper class, and decrease of middle class power in the democracy, while other ideas and mechanisms can be take from other nations.