Inequality for All

11/6/17

Professor Eskandari

“Inequality For All”

After watching the Robert Reich movie, “Inequality For All,” I took away the following ideas and points.

First, the film highlighted the historical background of wage equality in America. The data presented showed, generally, that past higher tax rates on the rich, enacted by both republicans and democrats, resulted in a much lower inequality gap. I found this ironic in terms of our current political situation in the context of the slogan, “Make America Great Again.” The president wants to drastically cut taxes for the American Citizen, specifically the wealthy American Citizen. But the times in the past when the president feels America was great were defined by their higher tax rates on the wealthy. The higher tax rates on the wealthy enabled more money to be injected into the middle class. The middle class does and did the majority of the money spending in America, which in turn fueled the businesses and corporations of the wealthy. The way of approaching this economic model was described by Robert Reich as “Middle-Out Economics,” instead of Top-Down or the reverse. Accompanied with higher amounts of money being injected in the middle class, education also proves to be a contributing factor to the success of middle-out economics. Higher education results in higher paying jobs, generally, and given that the middle class spends their money, higher paying jobs result in more money being injected into the economy.

But the model of “Middle-Out Economics” started to fade out of the political arena when President Reagan introduced the idea of “Top Down,” or “Trickle Down Economics.” At this point, the wage gap between the middle class and the upper class started to increase dramatically. Ronald Reagan’s deregulation resulted in more money going to the one percent, but the one percent individuals don’t spend as much as the middle class would had the same amount of money been given to them. For example, if we give one hundred million dollars to a one percent individual, he might spend some of the money, but more likely, he would put most of the money into the bank. If we were to inject the same amount of money into the middle class, some of the money would be saved, but much of the money would likely go towards paying for things, buying things, and paying for services. While the wages of the upper class rose, the wages of the middle class stayed relatively the same. With the money going to the upper class and then directly into their savings accounts,