35 Soul-Crushing Facts About American Income Inequality Summary

In “35 Soul-Crushing Facts about American Income Inequality”, the author, Larry Schwartz, makes it clear that the ever-increasing income and tax cuts the wealthiest Americans receive, as well as the decline in labor unions, results in the rest of the nation’s citizens to fare worse economically than those of previous generations. The writer shows that economic inequality, the difference between incomes across a population, has currently reached peak levels unprecedented since the Roaring Twenties, the period right before the Great Depression. Schwartz does an excellent job of supporting his claims by providing a vast amount of statistical evidence and historical background, which shows how dire the current situation of economic inequality is in the U.S.A. Despite the fact that the middle class has been taxed at an equal rate for the last fifty years, “Tax rates on the highest earning Americans have plunged from an almost 70% tax rate in 1945 down to around 35% today” (Schwartz). Consequently, these taxing policies have enabled the richest Americans to become wealthier by accumulating more wealth than in previous years. Moreover, since these extremely affluent men and women have more money to spend, they can invest it on more businesses or other financial endeavors to make themselves wealthier, whereas the middle class has not been allotted such a luxury. Also, in spite of “massive tax cuts, corporations have not created new jobs in America” (Schwartz). Unfortunately, the fact that these companies are stagnant in creating job opportunities can result in more difficulty for a middle or lower class person to get hired at one of them. This can cause unemployment, which further increases the income inequality gap. Furthermore, these corporations are mostly run by the wealthiest individuals in the nation, so it is fair to say that the tax cuts on the corporations are tax cuts on the income that these individuals receive, further increasing the gargantuan salaries that they already earn. In addition, the colossal disparity in wealth can also be linked to the decline in union membership. Schwartz explains how after World War II, unions helped maintain fair wages for workers, yet union membership is now “at an all-time low, about 11% of the workforce” (Schwartz). Subsequently, since control of wages now rests much more firmly in the hands of the rich men and women who …show more content…
Even though the average wealth of older Americans has increased since the 1980s, “the median wealth of people under 35 has dropped 68% since 1984” (Schwartz). It is important to note that many of the inordinately moneyed come from the older generations of Americans, and continue to get wealthier. The fact that younger people have less money than the generations preceding them provides even further evidence that there is a trend of increasing income inequality which will continue in the future. Another important statistic is that even though in the late 1940s, “a child born into poverty had about a 50 percent chance of scaling the income ladder into the middle class…A child born today has about a 33 percent chance” (Schwartz). The children born today will one day be the backbone of the American workforce, and if it is increasingly more difficult for children of lower classes to surpass their current economic standpoint, then it is reasonable to expect income inequality levels to become even more