Economic Distribution in the U.S. ,Why The Rich get richer - Term Paper Example

This brings us to the basic question, and incidentally the title of this essay, why the rich get Richer? This paper strives to offer a basic understanding of the economic distribution of income and wealth in America and the reasons for such discrepancies, which further widen the gap between the rich and the poor, making the rich – richer in the process and at the same time, pushing the poor towards stark poverty. During the early 1980s era, several economists as well as researchers initiated reports concerning the average wages of American workers, and pointed out the fact that their wages were stagnant ever since the early 1970s and that the allocation of their earnings was, in fact, becoming more and more unequal, thereby widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

Several explanations and suggestions were offered for such an occurrence. However one of the most significant of them was that the reason behind such a turn of events was the unemployment reallocation in the industrial composition of the country or the deindustrialization of the United States away from manufacturing industries to service oriented ones. It was believed that the average earnings of the workers in the service industry were relatively lower than that in the manufacturing industry.

The repercussion of such a transformation with respect to the breadwinners belonging to the ‘middle – class’ households was evident, and the news of the steadily deteriorating American middle class, made headlines across the nation creating a great furore. Further apprehensions over mounting income disparity surfaced in the mid - 1980s with the publication of several books, reports and researches on the topic, which fuelled the anxiety that Americans were now facing an escalating disproportion of outlooks in accomplishing a stable middle class existence.

The Economist stated that the gap between the rich and the poor is larger in the United States as