Povert & Social Inequality
Introduction
In this paper I will discuss the twin problems of poverty and economic inequality. I will give a brief overview of what each of these concepts means, what the US government is doing to “fix” these problems, and I will discuss whether the “fix” was effective or not.
Main Discussion
Poverty can be a slippery subject without first establishing a definition. According to Princeton University’s Wordnet (2008), poverty is “the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions”. There is another level of poverty, called the absolute poverty level, defined by UNICEF (1996) as “the income level below which a minimum nutritionally adequate diet plus essential non-food requirements is not affordable”. Either way you go, poverty means that a person doesn’t have very much, the sticky point is how much is not much, and when is that amount not enough. Economic inequality can be described as “the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer”. Basically, there is a gap in the level of income between the rich and the poor. In some societies the gap is small, in others the gap is relatively large.
Plutarch, the influential ancient Greek philosopher and author, said of economic inequality: "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Economic inequality has now reached "grotesque proportions" according to the Human Development Report issued by the United Nations in 1999. The gap between the rich and poor continues to grow: "While thirty years ago, the gap between the richest one-fifth of the world's population and the rest stood at 30-to-1, by 1990 it had widened to 60-to-1 and today stands at 74-to-1" (Dallmeyer, 2002).
Large differences in income and wealth are strong indicators of inequity. Both globally and in individual nations, income disparity not only exists, but is on the rise. In the United States, for example, "between 1973 and 2000 the average...
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