Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor

The number of food stamp recipients has reached 40.4 million in April, up by 310,000 compared to March.

On the other hand, there was observed increase in the number of millionaires. According to a new report released from Capgemini wealth tracking consultants the number of millionaires from the ten most important United States metropolitan areas increased 17.5 percent in 2009 compared to 2008. The largest number of millionaires can be found in New York City, which is reported to have more than 667,000 wealthy people, meaning 18.7 percent of the city’s total population. On the other hand, there are about 40 million people that are living in poverty. It is not easy to draw a conclusion from these two facts: a growing number of millionaires and an increasing number of extremely poor people. Kristin Seefeldt, a researcher affiliated with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan says that there will be a lot of people saying that this shows a greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands and that the rich are soaking the poor. The fact that there are more millionaires at the same time as there are greater numbers of people living below the poverty level makes researchers think what is there to be done for the society as to help the people with very low incomes.

The gap between the ones that have a lot of money and the ones that are poor has been growing larger in the last four decades as David Johnson, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Housing and Household Economics Statistics Division says, mentioning that he considered the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans versus that of the poorest 10 percent when making the comparison. The Census Bureau began marking these economic differences in 1967 when the richest ten percent of the country earned about 84,800 dollars, nine times more than the poorest ten percent. The difference was ten times by 1986 and in 2008 it reached 11.4 times, as the wealthiest earned an average of 138,300 dollars. The medium income is calculated on annual household income, and the poverty line for a single individual under the age of 65 years is 11,201 dollars a year. In 2008, 13.2 percent of Americans, which meant at that time about 39.8 million people, were living below the poverty level. The numbers show a continuous increase in the numbers of the poor people, and if you compare it to 2007, there is a 6.7 percent increase in the number of the needy. The same ascendant bias applies to rich people too, in 2009 the number of the Americans earning more than a million dollars increased by 16.5 percent compared to 2008. The large number of millionaires is originated in the rebound of the stock market in 2009, and Ed Merchant, Capgemini’s capital market services chief, says that if the market stays the same it is very likely that their number will decrease the next year. Unfortunately, the number of the poor seems to rise every year, no matter what.