How Unequal: America's Invisible Policy Choices

In this article by Fischer and Voss, they discuss about the effects of the various policies on inequality and how those policies serve to favor middle class and wealthy, while increasing the gap between poor and the rest of the Americans.

They lay out various ways through which middle class and wealthy people are subsidized through different policies. For example, middle class benefits from mortgage interest deduction on housing. "Homeownership gave middle class Americans independence, real property to pass on to their children, and an opportunity to make the kind of financial investment that once only the wealthy had been able to afford" (p. 139). This shows not only how the class gap between middle class and wealthy has decreased but also how policies such as this one serves to widen the class gap between those who are at the bottom and others above them. This kind of housing policy shows similarities to policies implimented earlier, such as GI Bill, which was initiated to help war veterans settle in after the war. Just as the GI Bill demonstrated racial discrimination by benefiting white veterans over the blacks, and ultimately increased the class gap ebtween the two races, housing policies implimented today shows similar trend of favoring one group over the other and thus deepening the level of inequality rooted in the society. Similarly, wealthy also benefit from the government policies. Through tax breaks, many corporations are subsidized as those tax breaks allow them to save enormous amount of money.

As a resut of policies favoring those who have resources on their hands, such as middle class and wealthy Americans, the American society is showing such high level of inequality compared to other industrialized countries. Many of the policies seem to aid people with resources to further acquire more resources, while making it difficult for many poor poeple to do so. Through Fischer and Voss's article, we clearly see that inequality is socially structured and constructed through policies implimented and that because this is the case, we could reduce the class gap and try to create more equal society through implimentation of policies that do not lean toward certain groups but lay out equal conditions for everyone.