Never mind the budding war between America and Iran. A skirmish could be coming a lot closer to home and it might even be as centrally located as your own city. In only two years, tensions have grown greatly between the upper and lower classes.
The results from a recent survey out of the Pew Research Center reveal that 66 percent of the adults studied believe that there are either “very strong” or “strong” conflicts existing between America’s elite and impoverished, a statistic that has skyrocketed in recent years. Between 2009 and 20011, the proportion of those that sense conflicts exist as such between the class groups grew by 19 percentage points. While less than half of Americans fearing a fight brewing at the dawn of the Obama administration, today two-out-of-three Americans feel that there is a strong conflict between both extremes of society.
The growing inequality among the distribution of wealth in America has been a focal point of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement. Next week the group will stage a protest in front of the Capitol Building in DC to demonstrate against, among other things, the corporate corruption between big business and Washington.
Aside from the relationship between the Capitol Building and the banks, though, the incredible amount of inequality in America today can be seen everywhere. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, tensions tighten within the US. While a buffer zone of the middle class once bridged a gap between the extremes of the spectrum and allowed the less fortunate an obtainable goal to strive for, earlier statistics published in 2011 reveal that even the middle class is evaporating in America. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of Americans who live in middle-income neighborhoods shrank from 65 percent down to 44. While some were fortunate enough to move into higher ranks of society, the study conducted by Stanford University found that the many moving to an ever-expanding lower-class.
“The bottom fifth in the US looks very different from the bottom fifth in other countries,” researcher Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution told the National Review recently. “Poor Americans have to work their way up from a lower floor.”
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