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Social Inequality In The United States

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Social inequality comes in many forms including things such as income, race, gender, and wealth. It is something we can see in everyday life, yet there are some people that don’t seem to think it exists, or it at least isn’t anything that they need to be concerned about because they’re doing just fine. I believe that they are wrong and that inequality affects us all in one way or another. It is something that we need to come to grips with and deal with as a society and is not a problem that can be solved on an individual basis.

Income inequality has come to the front as an issue over the past few years due to low-wage workers demanding a raise in the minimum wage. While the United States remains one of the richest countries in the world, …show more content…

I only included income inequality, but it stretches beyond that to race, sexuality, status, etc. All of those things need to be addressed by society as a whole, through policies and increasing access to opportunity among the poor.
Policies. Addressing inequality doesn’t mean we just increase the minimum wage and say we’re done. Actually, there is more to it, such as making sure policies are in place to help regulate Wall Street.
As it was put by Jim Lardner (2014) “One of the conspicuous drivers of inequality over the past three decades has been the spectacular income gains of the top 1 percent. Financial executives, traders, fund managers and others account for about one-fourth of those gains, and their paychecks, after taking a hit in the immediate wake of the crisis, are once again soaring to levels wildly disconnected from the state of the overall economy.” Reigning in these practices using policies like the Dodd Frank Act and the former Glass-Steagall act could help close the inequality gap by addressing misbehavior by the financial industry, such as pushing risky investments, which only serve the financial industry and hurt the people making these investments. Another bill called the Stop Subsidizing Multimillion Dollar Corporate Bonuses Act, would enhance a law already on the books that puts a cap on the tax deductibility of executive pay. The intention is to raise revenue …show more content…

Supposedly our system is “progressive”, which means that it is taxing higher incomes at higher rates, but with all of the loopholes and tax breaks that those at the top can work around, a lot of the lower classes actually end up paying more of a percentage of their income in taxes. Sales taxes and payroll taxes also hit those income levels harder because, again, those end up being a larger amount of their total income. For example, Kansas now has one of the nation’s highest sales tax rates, at 6.5%, in the nation. Many localities have additional local taxes on top of that, making the total tax rate upwards of 10% in some places. (Kansas Department of Revenue, 2015). A 10% sales tax is going to make life a lot harder for someone who only brings home $600 a month than it is on someone who brings home $4000 a month. Regressive taxes like this tend to hit the lower and middle class harder so, if we want to improve income inequality we can move to reduce those. At the federal level, congress can move to implement policies like I mentioned, along with others that would make the system fairer and distribute wealth a little more

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