The Income Gap Between Rich and Poor

The Growing Income Gap between the Rich and Poor In the United States the income gap between the rich and the poor is at an all time high. This fact is very strange to me because I hear President Bush claim that there are so many new jobs available, the unemployment rate is down, interest rates are low, and inflation is going down. These two claims seem contradictory to me, and in my paper I will hope to find out why the income gap is so high when President Bush claims the economy is doing so well. First I will try to explore why the income gap is so high when there are so many jobs available for those who are unemployed. According to David Leonhardt a writer for the New York Times, the problem is that the jobs available for the poor are not paying them enough money to stay alive. David 's article was called Out of a Job and No Longer Looking, in this article he says that the poor people are "unwilling to take new jobs that pay for less, so a rising and growing number of them instead depend on a government check to get by". We can clearly see if they are just getting money from the government to get by, this would be an immediate cause for a fluctuation in the income gap. According to David the number of poor people that are not looking for a job, and waiting for a welfare check is rising. David Leonhardt also states that "millions of people, particularly men, have dropped out of the labor force over the last decade, apparently unable to find work that pays near what they once earned in the blue-collar jobs that have moved to lower wage countries". A number of companies are moving to countries where they can get cheap labor, and this is leaving a number of people without jobs. The sad part is when these companies break up there are only a few supervisors, and CEO 's that are out of work, but there are a number of blue collar workers that are out of jobs. The supervisors and CEO 's tend to find another job faster than the regular workers because there is

Cited: 2. Leonhardt, David. "Out of a Job and No Longer Looking." New York Times 29 Sept. 2002. 6. "Grounded by an Income Gap: Inequality Just Keeps Growing in the U.S.." The Nation 5 Aug. 2002. 7. Newman, Katherine. "Working Poor." Harvard Magazine 29 Oct. 1999.