Inequality

In the first essay The Growing Gulf Between the Rich and the Rest of Us, by Holly Sklar, in They Say, I say, Sklar argued that the wealthy are getting richer, wheelie the poor keep getting poorer. The author uses evidence from Forbes 400, which list the 400 wealthiest people in the world. She noted in her essay that 374 out of the 400 on the list are billionaires and the number is continuing to rise. The minimum on the list was a whopping $900 million (in 2005) and this number is up $150 million from 2004, only a year later. She also cites the CIA World Factbook, which says that the United States, “Since 1957, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20 percent of households.” She uses this evidence to state that the United States has “rising levels of poverty and inequality not found in other rich economies.” This proves her argument that while the rich people in the United States keep making more and more money, the poor make less and less and it is now harder to work their way out of poverty. Skar concludes her essay by making one last point; that tax cuts are still being made for the wealthy, while the poor seem to get no help from the government. In Sklar’s argument she uses the term ‘inequality’ a lot to compare the wealthy and the poor.
Bruce Bartlett argues a completely different point in his essay The Truth About Wages. His argument was that the rich may be making more money, but he does not believe that this is an expense to the poor. He star out his essay by showing the reader that the average worker in the United States had a weekly earnings of about $275.49 in August of 2006, which was a few cents less than the $275.61 weekly earnings they made in August of 1966. He sees the trends for average Americans flattening, not getting any better or worse. He calls this “income stagnation.” He gives two reasons for the trend: lower memberships into labor unions and gratuity towards having a job at all. Bartlett also points out that the rising cost of health care assists to the stagnation of wages. The average person will keep a decent job with good healthcare, over a better paying job with low to no healthcare coverage available. He begins to end his essay by telling the reader that despite wage stagnation, more and more people are still moving out of the working class and into the middle and upper classes. Also, households with an income greater than $75,000 (households that are considered “well-to-do”) rose almost one percent from 2005 to 2004. His conclusion is that the rich are getting richer, that is true, but also the percentage of low-income households has fallen meaning that the category of “well-to-do” households with a salary of $75,000 plus, now contains more people than ever.