The income gap in the United States has been increasing says cnbc. “The top 1 percent of families took home an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015”. This is a large increase from 2013. Income inequality is on the rise and the top 1% of people make on average 441,000 dollars where as the average for the other 99% is 50,00 dollars. Income inequality affects all areas of the country and not just the urban and city areas. This article describes how even though the minimum wage has been steadily increasing continuously the wage gap continues to increase. in 1965 the CEO average wage was 20 times more than the average income in the US while now the average CEO makes more than 271 times more than the average US income. “For some reason, the economy just doesn’t have the generation of wage growth we’d like to see,” Price said. “We like to focus a light on the way that income is distributed to share that the people who make decisions are benefiting from the economy in a way we might not all be.”. I think this quote is the real Embodiment of what this article is about, even though the minimum wage continues to grow we are not seeing the wage growth we would like to see. The wage increase is not enough to keep up with the current price increase and the current economy in general. The wage increase is enough to keep up with the increase of price of goods and inflation but not enough for anyone to get out of a poverty situation or become one of the wealthy ones in the top 1%. This is a major problem because not allowing people to get out of this cycle of increasing wages and inflation can really limit a persons way of life and their ability to get out of the low income situation they are in. CEO’s and other high level executives make far more money then most and in a lot of cases do less work than those who make far less money but because they are in a position of power they can continue to grow their wealth while others that make the company successful get paid a fraction of that wage. This connects to the sociology reading because it goes back to chapter 2 part 2 of class inequality. Poverty continues to increase, social and economic classes continue to become more separate and most importantly as people wages continue to cover less and less of the cost of living it creates many problems such as not being able to afford health care, difficulty find housing, and lack of education which isn’t good for anyone in a productive society.
Written by: Logan Bronemann
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/income-inequality-continues-to-grow-in-the-united-states.html
SOC101 