Income Inequality Blog (1/31/15)

3. The thing that most surprised me about income inequality in America is what people thought about it. Specifically, the differences between how people believed income was spread among the population versus how income is actually spread among the American population. I was surprised that so many people, including me, were oblivious to the actual amount of income inequality in America. Why is there such a great range in the differences of incomes between the richest rich and the poorest poor? Another thing that I was surprised by was the amount of people that still believed that the American Dream was a real thing that could happen to anyone. I, frankly, don't believe that the American Dream is a very real thing. I think when America was starting out it might have been easier to move from class to class; now, however, it would be very hard to move from one social class to another because the social classes are so different from one another. I believe that the majority of the people, who work hard to try to be successful in life, are not given the opportunity to be successful. For example, a child, who is born into a very poor family that lives in a bad neighborhood, will end up going to a bad school. This child will either not get a very good education or will work hard to learn and make themselves smarter. Even if they work hard and are very smart, they will not have many opportunities to push themselves out of their neighborhood and class that they live in. However, I believe that some hard-working people get lucky and are able to move to a higher-up social class, yet this is only a very small percentage of all the hard-working, poor people. I believe the reason that many people believe the American Dream is a real thing is because we only here about the success stories of these few people; we don't hear about all the other hard-working people, who never go far in life because of the unfairness of our country.