Inequality by Design (Reading for June 28th)

Social Inequality can be caused from diverse policies performed by the government because it can be disproportionated to certain group of people against the other. In the U.S., inequality between people is usually made from policies performed in U.S. According to explanation of Claude S. Fischer and Kim Voss in “Inequality by Design”, social inequality is made from diverse favorable assistances for middle and wealthy classes in contrast to assistance for the poor: “…limited direct help to some of the poor and indirectly to subsidize, with another, the middle class and the wealthy.” (129) Although there are programs to support the poor, there are several problems to secure stable living status of the poor like wealthy people as “our spending to aid the poor precarious. Assistance is a donation; it is not a right, as it is elsewhere, and it is therefore politically vulnerable.” (134 and 135) In addition, being getting support from the government is difficult because the government in U.S. supports the poor when certain complex eligibility is fulfilled. (135) Thus, from this structure of the government policy in U.S., it is not easy to decrease the gap between the poor and wealthy people.

In contrast to supporting for the poor, the government in U.S. favorably supports the middle and wealth class through diverse mechanisms such as “Subsidizing homeownership” (136), “Health care” (141), “Corporate Welfare” (144), “Taxes” (146), and “regulating the labor market” (148). Like those mechanisms for wealthy people, while the government is weak to support the poor, they is easily supporting wealthy people than the poor; this appearance of the government is an important factor to continue social inequality between the poor and wealthy people. (136) As a result, the poor is losing their place by being unjustly treated behind supporting of the goverment for the wealthy. Thus, inequality is serious problem for life of the poor and further for entire society because from this status of the poor, diverse social problems that eventually can affect entire citizens in a society can be caused. Thus, as the authors in this reading indicated, to make more equal society than now, it is important to prepare diverse tools from the government to decrease the gap between the wealthy and the poor, not effort for decreasing the gap between people above the poor.