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Income Inequality In America

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Income inequality has affected Americans in many different ways. Americans are faced with making decisions that will determine how they will earn enough money to take care of their families as well as send their children to college and invest for retirement. In fact, many Americans have even lost their homes due to the change in their incomes. Regrettably, the American people cannot achieve what they once thought would be achievable. Income equality occurs when there is an uneven distribution of income and wealth between the social classes of American citizens. Additionally, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the result is an unstable gap between the rich and the poor.
There have been many studies on income inequality and the effect …show more content…

The purpose of this study was to find out what Americans knew about income inequality. The study was conducted as a survey where 5,000 Americans were asked to guess the percentage of wealth owned by the fifth of the population. Wealth was defined as savings, property, stocks, etc., minus a person’s debts. The results of the study revealed that there was a huge disconnect between what people believed and what was actually the case. For the second part of the study people were asked their ideal distribution of wealth. The findings of the survey stated that the average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. In reality the top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a very small percentage which is …show more content…

This study was also about income inequality. Again, it was conducted as a survey where 55,000 people from 40 countries were asked to estimate how much corporate CEOs and unskilled workers earned. Then they asked people how much CEOs and workers should earn. The findings were that most Americans estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. In actuality, 354-to-1 is the actual ratio of CEO-to worker pay. Fifty years ago, it was 20-to-1. Again, the patterns were the same for all subgroups, regardless of age, education, political affiliation, or opinion on inequality and pay. “In sum,” the researchers concluded, “respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those

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