Wealthiest Counties in the United States

According to Inequality.org, “We equate wealth with ‘net worth,’ the sum total of your assets minus liabilities. Assets can include everything from an owned personal residence and cash in savings accounts to investments in stocks/bonds, real estate, and retirement accounts. Liabilities cover what a household owes: a car loan, credit card balance, student loan, mortgage, or any other bill yet to be paid. In the United States, wealth inequality runs even more pronounced than income inequality” (Wealth). Wealth disparity affects everyone in America. When the top twenty percent of earners in America take over fifty percent of total earnings in any given year, It can be see as very unfair by anyone who is in the middle class and especially the lower class of citizens in the U.S. It is safe to say that both sides of the political world (Republicans and Democrats) are equally worried about how economic inequality will affect their children and future generations. No matter who you ask, rich or poor, and whatever their opinion on the shape of economic distribution in America is, they most likely have a unrealistic sense of the state it is actually in.

Poverty affects millions of people living in the united states, poverty is measured by the amount of money needed to support the basic needs of a house hold. Poverty is measured by the SSA low-cost food budget assuming 1/3 of the budget is spent on food. The people with the highest percentage of poverty is shown to be Hispanic female households with no spouse present. The vast majority of people in poverty are women and children but in recent years the numbers of women considered poor have raised. Percentage rate is the percentage of poor in different counties. Looking at graph that maps Americas diversity shows that the highest poverty rate is in the South the Midwest has the least. I would assume that has to do with the weather, warmer weather

Bell, a city of 35,000 people, has remained to be the greatest scandal in California. For a long time, the manager of Bell City Robert Rizzo and the people he was working with exploited the governance systems and the finances of the city (McGrath 122). They used vast sums of money to pay their salaries. They also transformed the development agency of the town into a piggy bank, from where they borrowed funds in an improper way, deposited money in retirement accounts that was illegal, purchased property without accounting in and documents, approved fees and taxes that were illegal and found out a way of exempting themselves from state law. Court documents provide evidence to show that indeed, those people committed the crime of corruption.

Fresno County is one of the most populated and diverse counties in California having more than seventy ethnic groups in the metropolitan area. It is ranked first nation for agricultural production with annual sales of $3 billion. Within the county there are fifteen incorporated cities, Fresno being one of them. Fresno was founded by Central Pacific Railroad Company in 1872.

Andrew Kehoe, a farmer and treasurer of the school board, was a man who experienced severe financial

In the video, Wealth Inequality in America, there were many things that caught my attention the second time around that i had not understood the first time listening to it. When they had surveyed 5,000 people I was not surprised to see that the ideal for most Americans would be a somewhat even distribution of wealth among the various groups. What I was most shocked about was what most American think about the distribution of wealth is not even close to what the reality has to hold. The fact that lowest 20 - 30 percent don't even register as sharing in the wealth of America as they are behind the poverty line. They are living of “pocket change”. The top 1 percent didn't even shock me as much as how the middle class did.

The Bell California trial was a corruption scandal that cost the small community of Bell California millions of dollars (Freeman, 2012). Robert Rizzo was the city manager of Bell. During his tenure, he along with several other city officials managed to increase their salaries and retirement pensions without the residence of Bell knowing it. Some of the amounts in increase far surpassed the head of the Los Angeles Police Departments salary. The salary and pension increases were done by illegal tax increases as well as other means that the taxpayers were unaware of (McGrath, 2013). Some of the monies were acquired by shaking down businesses for extra fees or threatened with their businesses being closed for failure to pay. The small community

The video Wealth Inequality in America provides an eye-opening experience to inequality’s reality in the United States. Most Americans believe the system we have today is bad however what they think is far from the ideal and even farther from the reality. The video provides chart to have visuals of the wealth distribution in the United States. Of course, going to socialism would not be the best route. 9 out of 10 Americans feel the ideal wealth distribution should be a curve. The reality chart depicts the wealthy people and top one percent is off the chart since they have so much wealth. Additionally, the top one percent posses quarter of the national income. The narrator suggest we need to revise reality and not what we think it is.

I worked for the Kings County Board of Realtors before going back to school from 2007 till 2014, I feel I had a front row seat to what transpired. The market soared in the early 2000’s because loans were given out like candy to people that really couldn’t afford it and didn’t understand what they were signing up for when their rates would change and their houses were being ripped out from under them. I watched as houses were taken from families left setting empty for several months creating eye soars in the community. Other problems arose as well, pools left stagnant creating pest issues, break-ins by drug uses to collect cooper wiring and appliances. Bailouts by the government that were designed to help people keep their homes were being used by banks after the house sat in ruin for several months. One of the main problems I saw was the people that were creating the problem were also in charge of the solutions which is bad business. They were able to bail themselves out but it left families without homes.

California is a unique state that is the most populated. Sometimes state and national leaders differ over California's management. Maddees become worse when determining financial responsibility for costly issues.

In his early life he read books and was very into education, so that meant he became one of the most wealthiest business men of America.

According to Mark Baldassare , there are three main factors, which cause Orange County bankruptcy. The first one in the political fragmentation, the county had 31 cities and more than 150 governmental entities. Second, distrust of government was rampant among an electorate that was not traditionally conservative but, rather, “new fiscal populist,” combining dislike of taxes with moderate social views and a middle-class bias, in favor of the selective continuation of government programs for its own benefit rather than for those less well off. Third, state fiscal austerity played a major role. Orange County, was especially hard hit by the annual loss of $100 million in property taxes from the state during 1991-1994.

The Bell California corruption was a scandal in a small blue collar community involving city officials that misappropriation of public funds by increasing property taxes and using voter fraud. These official were a greedy criminal who created large salaries for themselves. According to Bell City Council stated that Robert Rizzo was the ringleader in the alleged corruption. The Council collected a total of $1.3 million by serving on the committee that did not exist. For those that serve on the board and increase their salary to $100,000 a year working part-time only which included retirement and medical benefits. In reality, the board did not perform any duties except 34 minutes was given for a brief meeting in which they talk about increasing

California is a highly dynamic state whose needs are in the eternal realm of changing and adjusting because of the diversification and growing population. Likewise, every county experiences different problems, and most of those problems require strategic problem solving because there is no one fit solution for all. This is the essence of California’s political system. The counties are legal entities responsible for governing and protecting segments of the population. Whereas, the state is responsible for the oversight and compliance, as well as, reimbursement of taxes and federal money. Baldassare (1998) illustrated three conditions: political fragmentation, voter distrust, and state’s fiscal austerity that explain current political environment,

“Who is the richest American ever?”When asked this question, the name that most often come to mind is Bill Gates but the actual American to become the richest is also the most two-sided businessman: Andrew Carnegie, hero or villain?. In order to answer that question we have to know what the words "hero” and "villain” actually mean. According to Webster Dictionary, a hero is a “person, especially a man admired for courage, nobility, or exploits, especially in war,” and "the central figure in any important event or period, honored for outstanding qualities.” or basically a role model who does good for a cause and has good morals while a villain is described as "someone or something regarded as the cause of a problem, difficulty, injustice,