American Way of Poverty

We all know that the economy is going downhill. More and more people are losing their jobs, homes, and prides. The unemployement rate is extremely high and even the basic necessities to live are hard to buy. The tax system in our country however does nothing to help the struggling lower classes. As we have been studying in class the "Sharing of the National Wealth" is extremely off balance. The chart shows us that poor people are gettibng less and less than they should be and the rich people are getting more and more. What is even more unbelievable is that the lower classes are most of the population. Our government is allowing all of this to continue even though, the majority of the population is struggling to live. To help us more understand the poverty in the U.S., we learned about taxes, did stimulations, research, and are now watching a movie.

Taxes-
There are a couple of different tax systems. We have effective, progressive, regressive, and flat taxes.
Flat tax- Everybody (poor, rich, middle) pays the same percent. An example of this would be sales tax.
Regressive tax- When poor people pay a higher percent than rich people pay. An example of this would be *
Progressive tax- This type of tax is when rich people pay a higher percent than poor people. An example of this would be *
Effective tax- This tax is how much you end up paying and what percent of your income that is. An example of this would be *
As you can see these taxes are mostly unfair because why should a rich person have to pay the same or less than someone who gets paid less than they do.

Stimulations-
We played musical chairs twice in class to show us different things about poverty. The first time it was to show us how the lower classes fight for oppurtunities that could better us. Everytime one more person did not get the seat symbolized the oppurtunity that was lost or taken. When people fought over the chairs, it showed how hard some people were willing to try and work for these oppurtunities more than others. The second stimulation with the musical chairs was to show us how as less and less chairs (oppurtunities) were available to poorer people, the richer people owned more and more of those chairs (oppurtunities). Andy was like the police who made sure that we wouldn't sit on the rich people's chairs which is how it is in real life. He also made sure we noticed that one chair would always be open for the poor class so that we could never say it was unfair and that the middle and lower class would blame themselves for not being able to get to that chair or oppurtunity.

Internet Research-
I did not get much work done with this but I found out that there are a lot of types of health cares and some are more expensive than others but they all have restrictions to them.