What even is the Income Gap?

  

    Before I began my junior theme, I didn't know anything about the gap between the rich and the poor. Sure, I knew that it was "widening," whatever that meant, but I never really understood how severe of an issue it is. And that's the problem. Americans know that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, but that's pretty much it. Many people don't know, or don't understand that, as the attached video states, "The richest 1% take home almost a quarter of the nation's wealth." I'm not a numbers person, but even I understand that a quarter of the nation's wealth, is a lot of money. People also may not be aware that "The CEO now makes 380 times the average worker's. Not the lowest paid employee...the average one." I can't help but ask myself, doesn't this anger people? A CEO could be working just as hard as one of its workers, yet it is making 380 times more?!? I'm sure that people are angry, but we just don't hear about it. 

    Finding a solution to this growing issue is going to take a lot of work involving many different aspects of our society (taxes, education, technology, etc.), but in my opinion, before any of that happens, the leaders in our society, and people in general, are going to have to start understanding, and being more open to how huge of an issue this really is. Just take a look at the video; it is clear that Americans' perception of how wealth is distributed is skewed, not even close to the reality. One of the reasons for this could be because of how politicians treat the issue. As Peter Edelman mentioned in his book So Rich, So Poor, in regards to the Recovery act, "Obama made little use of the word "poverty"...[but instead] used the word "vulnerable"...to characterize low-income people." Poverty is a real thing and as the income gap grows, it only is going to become a larger issue. If the leader of our country can barely make use of the word, then American people will not think of it as the serious issue that it is.