Preview

Analysis Of Who Me? A One Percenter? By Robert Frank

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
240 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Analysis Of Who Me? A One Percenter? By Robert Frank
In the article, “Who Me? A One Percenter?” written by Robert Frank, he explains how one percenters have difficulty defining themselves as the one percent. Mr. Frank also states “A new study that the vast majority of people earning more than $250,000 a year say they are not in the One Percent.” According to the Mendelsohn Affluent Barometer, Americans assume they’re in the top twenty percent but actually rank in the top 3 percent or higher. Another fact upon the barometer is that the term “ultra affluents” is what the 3 percenters are named as a group. Then there are those with an income of $343,000 annually which make up the one percent. Some of these people deny the fact that they are one percenters because they compare themselves to famous
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Wealth Inequality In America Summary
    • 227 Words
    • 1 Page

    Wealth Inequality In America Summary

    After watching the video, "Wealth Inequality in America", published by Politizane, I was surprised when finding out that only the top one percent of America has 40 percent of all the nation's wealth. It was also surprising to discover that the top one percent owns half the country's stocks, bonds, and mutual bonds, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans own only half a percent of these investments. One of the notions I had that was challenged by the video was the amount of money the wealthy actually have compared to the rest of the classes. I was aware that wealth mostly distributed to the wealthy class, but I never imagined that the division between the wealthy class and the rest of the classes would be so huge. Its incredible that the CEO's…

    • 227 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Robert Reich Why The Rich Are Getting Richer Analysis
    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Robert Reich Why The Rich Are Getting Richer Analysis

    Throughout the Article, Robert Reich talks about the growing gap between the upper half of society and the lower half of society. The main narrator of this article is the author, Robert Reich who is telling a story about America’s social classes. Reich uses a metaphor to explain how the economy is going down and up for the rich and the poor. He says that it’s a boat we’re all in, “one sinking rapidly one sinking more slowly and the third rising steadily” (1). Reich is referring to the three social classes, the lower class, the middle class, and the upper class. The lower class keeps getting poorer because of job loss, due to more automation and competition from other countries…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    A Review on the Rich and the Rest of Us
    • 1169 Words
    • 5 Pages

    A Review on the Rich and the Rest of Us

    Recently with the Presidential election campaign, a lot was said about the difference between the middle class and the rich. Especially with the tax cuts issue where tax cuts are being wanted for the middle class and the wealthy shall not be given any cuts. Any household that is earning anything more than $1 million per year should not be paying lesser income tax than what a middle class family does.…

    • 1169 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Muckrakers Contribution To The Progressive Era
    • 1120 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Muckrakers Contribution To The Progressive Era

    The gap between the upper class and everyone else widens to a point where the richest “4,000 families in the U.S” have as much wealth as “11.6 million…

    • 1120 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Thomas Paine: An Analysis Of Social Classes In America
    • 467 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Thomas Paine: An Analysis Of Social Classes In America

    Individually, the U.S. has the one percent of Upper Class, the thirty percent of the Upper Middle Class, the thirty two percent of the Middle Class, the seventeen percent of the Lower Middle Class, and lastly, the overwhelming twenty percent of the poor. Now lets specifically look at that top one percent and the bottom twenty percent. How is it that one percent of America controls fifty percent of the national currency, and twenty percent controls a small fraction of it? A major reason for this is due to the rich influencing a specific idea or creating legislation for wealthy politicians in return for a large payoff. If a person were to look at Paine’s quote, “There, the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged,” he/she would be in great…

    • 467 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Socratic Seminar
    • 1082 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Socratic Seminar

    That small elite has received 95% of wealth created since 2009, after the financial crisis, while the bottom 90% of Americans have become poorer, Oxfam said.…

    • 1082 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Who Rules America?
    • 362 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Who Rules America?

    Domhoff goes on to say that the majority of wealth and income in the United States has for most of the nineteenth century been held by the top one percent of the nation, where they steadily held onto 36.6 percent of all wealth. Furthermore, in reference to who benefits from this, Domhoff asserts that the upper class is by far the "most powerful group in society" and institutes methods to make sure things remain like this.…

    • 362 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Best Essays

    wealth inequality in america
    • 1528 Words
    • 5 Pages

    wealth inequality in america

    In today’s capitalist economy, where economic transactions and business in general is centered on self-interest, there is a natural tendency for some people to make more than others. That is the basis for the “American Dream,” where people, if they worked hard, could make money proportional to their effort. However, what happens when this natural occurrence grows disproportional in its allocation of wealth within a society? The resulting issue becomes income inequality. Where a small portion of the population, own the majority of the wealth and the majority of the population own only a fraction of what the rich own. This prominent issue has always been the subject of social tension from even before the French Revolution and spawns numerous other social issues in a society. In the more recent Occupy Movement, beginning in 2011, protesters used income inequality as a motive. Moreover, they were justified in doing so. In a 2010 statistic, it was revealed that the top 1% of America, own 35% of the wealth while the lower 80%, over the majority of the population, only have 11% of the nation’s wealth distributed between them. Financially the situation is even worse where the bottom 80% own only 5% of the financial wealth and the top 1% own 42% of the Nation’s financial wealth. Not to say the top 1% didn’t work hard to get to where they are, but according to the ideals of the “American Dream,” the top 1% should have worked 243 times harder than the average, not the poorest, worker in America. This extreme of disproportional wealth distribution is not only a source of social conflict, but a catalyst for various other problems that exist.…

    • 1528 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Best Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Stereotypes In American People's Misperceptions Of America
    • 977 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Stereotypes In American People's Misperceptions Of America

    Everyone wants to be considered equals or even outrank each other, regardless if they have the money or not. In Florence King's article Stuck in the Middle: How to Understand America's Class System, King states: "Our upper class are somebody, our lower class are nobody, and our middle class are everybody"(312). If you have a lot of money then you are considered “somebody” because you can afford the best things. If you don't make enough money to afford nice things, let alone…

    • 977 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Stop And Frisk Pros And Cons
    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Stop And Frisk Pros And Cons

    Some people feel the rich do not pay their fair share in taxes. “The 95th/50th ratio in 2011 was $186,000 divided by $50,054, which equals 3.72. In other words, the income of houses in the 95th percentile was 3.72 times the income of households in the 50th percentile. Those in the top 25th percentile obtained a vast majority of the income in America (79.5% in 2007 and 75.9% in 2010.” (Evans, “Wealth”). This does prove that wealth is not evenly distributed among all Americans, which is an understandable thing to be upset…

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Middle-Class Homelessness in America
    • 1199 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Middle-Class Homelessness in America

    Many studies have been conducted to define middle-class without much success. It has been attempted to relate it to annual income. One study states that yearly incomes between $32,900 and $64,000, another between $50,800 and $122,000, and the U.S. census bureau middle 60% of incomes is the largest range of all lies between$ 20600, and $102,000 as what defines middle-class. Dan Horn notes in the Cincinnati Enquirer “Psychologist Ken Eisold, a contributor to Psychology today, said, though, that the way people describe their social status has more to do with what’s going on in their heads than their wallets.” Eisold goes on to say that “it’s really more about identity”. Horn adds that Julie Heath, director of the University of Cincinnati’s Economics Center agrees with Eisold that saying, “We’re a middle-class family has more than a financial connotations to it, it has a salt-of the earth to it. That’s the bed rock.” Essentially this shows that Americans do not base their social status on their income alone, but also on their personal accomplishments and views of where they have come from and where they are going. That being said, the bed rock of the middle-class comes from one of the most common descriptions what living in America is all…

    • 1199 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    The One Percent Research Paper
    • 1793 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The One Percent Research Paper

    A good friend of mine recently recommended me to watch a documentary called “The One Percent.” I do not usually watch documentaries unless I am gaining some type of knowledge out of the information presented. Unsure of what it was about and what I was going to get out of it, I turned on NetFlix and proceeded to watch the film. I soon came to realize I was enamored by this film, “The One Percent,” and it remains one of my favorite documentaries of all time. The documentary deals with the disparity between the wealthy elite and the citizenry and how they are both so far removed from one another. “As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth.” (Domhoff, 2010, The Wealth Distribution, para. 1). The producer and interviewer presents this film through many wealthy American businessmen, critics, economists and even his own family to explain this major social gap that exists on our home front. When looking at the differences side-by-side, it is hard to grasp that we all live in the same place, the United States of America.…

    • 1793 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    The decline of the middle class
    • 1564 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The decline of the middle class

    Who is the America’s middle class? According to Jack Brubaker of Lancaster Online, “90 percent of Americans consider themselves members of the economic middle class.” These are households that make more than $25,000 a year, just above the US government’s poverty level. Everyone believes they belong to the middle class, from families struggling to make ends meet while on government assistance, to a banker who makes more in a month than some people make in a year. According the US census bureau, the median household income is just over $50,000 a year. While researcher’s statistics vary, a person belonging to the middle class makes $40,000 to $100,000 a year.…

    • 1564 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Poverty In The United States
    • 2924 Words
    • 12 Pages

    Poverty In The United States

    Former assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, Peter Edelman, argues that "inequality in the distribution of wealth is a major cause of poverty," he also adds that the problem is getting worse (Capitalism Causes Poverty). "Twenty years ago, the wealthiest one percent had as much income as the poorest 20 percent of the population; today, that one percent controls as much wealth as the poorest 35 percent" (Capitalism Causes Poverty). This is one illustration of how it is harder today for those in poverty to rise higher in society because the wealthiest people control a substantially larger amount of money than they did before. Also the article from the Economist, Meritocracy in America, shows this uneven balance in wealth by stating "In 2001 the top 1% of households earned 20% of all income and held 33.4% of all net worth" (Meritocracy in America). The article also declares that the top 1% has not controlled this much wealth since before the depression (Meritocracy in America). Once again this shows how it has become incredibly hard for people to achieve a state of living above the poverty level. More evidence to support this argument, once again, comes from the article Meritocracy in America. The article proclaims that between 1979 and 2000 "the income of households in the lowest fifth grew by 6.4% while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth" (Meritocracy in America). Again this shows how hard it is to ascend to a higher level in society. A study was done by Thomas hertz, an economist at American University in Washington DC. He studied families over…

    • 2924 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    The Rich Are Different from You and Me
    • 385 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Rich Are Different from You and Me

    In the article “The Rich Are Different from You and Me,” author Chrystia Freeland explains the rising phenomenon of income inequality that is occurring between the richest top 10% and bottom 90% of the population. Chrystia Freeland states “In every society, some people are richer than others, but across time and geography, the gap between the rich and the rest has widely varied. The reality today is that the rich-especially the very, very rich- are vaulting ahead of everyone else” (51). Between the years of 2002 and 2007, income statistics show that the gap between the richest 10% and the bottom 90% of the population had significantly increased. Statistics also show that by 2007, approximately 35% of the wealth was maintained by the top 10%, leaving about 27% of wealth to the bottom 90% of the population. This is about an 8% gap in between. The last time income inequality was this high was in the 1920’s, but back then only 20% of wealth was gained from work. Today the top 10% gains at least 60% of their wealth from work, rather than inheritance. As economies throughout the world mature, income inequality will continue to rise. The gap between the rich and all others is primarily found in United States. Other countries such as Canada, China, and the United Kingdom are beginning to see income inequality as well. Freeland also states that “These global super- rich work and play together” (52). They share common interests such as business traveling, and vacationing around the world. Due to the common interests shared by others most like themselves, they have become separated from all others within the population, and have formed their own world governed by plutocracy. Author Chrystia Freeland is concerned that because the rich are so caught up in their world of wealth that they will not recognize that other…

    • 385 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics