separate about status and class
I have learned to separate about status and class because I use to think they lead to one meaning. The social condition, also known as socioeconomic status, is a composite measure of one’s income, education, and occupation. In contrast, one’s social class is usually a self-report measure, while type in sociology is defined as a group of people sharing a collective experience or position in the economic order. Or a group of people having more or less equal financial resources and indicating a similar standard of living in a society. Class is divided into the upper class, middle class, working-class, or lower class. But one could look at this theoretically and recognize that a person occupies a status but plays a role, in this case, a class. Then we evaluate their performance based on how well their performance of the task matches the part they occupy, the status.
Maybe to some people, we’re still not doing enough to help poor people. Nevertheless, you very quickly run into the problem with dis-incentivizing people to provide for themselves. And shifting the burden to the remaining taxpayers, which ends up becoming a self-fulling cycle as you end up dis-incentivizing hard-working people from working as you increase the percentage of their paycheck going to freeloaders. It’s a tricky balance that politicians argue on regularly and probably will forever.
In the U.S., economic policy is written and enacted solely for the benefit of the wealthy class. This is entirely due to the reality that the wealthy classes have been in complete control of the U.S. government. And this gives them the ability to decide which policies are enacted, and which are repealed. It is no accident that these policies, written by the rich, for their own benefit, have resulted in an ever-widening gap in the ownership of wealth and income between them and the rest of our citizens.
These policies are designed to do just correctly what they are doing, which is to transfer wealth to the top. Economic policies designed to do this will inevitably have the effect of producing more poverty, and more “poor people” Also, it is a matter of awareness. Most Americans are not poor. But the poor tend to live in certain parts of urban areas, where they are quite visible. Plus, the media covers the issue of poverty, which is often tied to race and crime.