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STUDENT LETTERS ON INCOME INEQUALITY

The following are letters from 9th-grade students at Charles City High School on the topic of income inequality.

Fix income inequality little by little

A growing problem in our economy today is income inequality. Many citizens are highly upset about the impact it has on not only them, but their friends and family. Although this issue cannot be easily fixed, we can work toward making our economic system better, little by little. Raising taxes on the top of the social economic ladder would be a good start.

In the 1950’s, tax rates on the top one percent were at 91 percent. Income inequality was also at its lowest. According to www.americansfortaxfairness.org, the top 1 percent today puts forth about 24.7 percent of their income into taxes. As tax rates on the wealthy came down to match those of the middle class, inequality rose to its highest point. Even some very rich people agree that matching the wealthiest people in America with average everyday citizens is wrong.

The problem with rich people isn’t that they have a lot of money, it’s that it doesn’t all get spent. When they get to keep 75.3 percent of the millions of dollars they make per year, quite a bit of it goes unused. Other families that pay the same rate are struggling to not only pay bills to live comfortably, but to cover expenses that come with children or pets. This type of comparison is not fair. Why do the wealthy, with billions of dollars, need to make more income?

Another way we can decrease income inequality is by increasing minimum wage. I don’t think we should go straight up to $15, or even increase it to that amount at all. Eleven dollars would be more of an appropriate amount. It’s not so much to make a living off of, but it’s enough to get a family of three in poverty off of their feet and help them afford necessities.

Many say that we shouldn’t raise minimum wage because some people, such as teens, don’t need that money. That opinion, although popular, is very biased. There are teenagers in this community working to support their family with only the skills to qualify for a minimum wage job. They don’t think about how when people spend more, the economy does better.

As income inequality continues to be a growing problem, there’s more and more of a need to act upon it.

Madi Pellymonter, CCHS student

Schools can help with income inequality

To overcome income inequality is to have better college education in public schools. You can do this by having schools offering more college credits, and most likely the college attendance would go up.

For a person who can’t afford college, by giving more college credits in high school, maybe it’ll help them.

Instead of them telling someone, ‘Oh I can’t go to college because I don’t have the money,” some graduates will go to work for a year then go to college. By doing that they can at least have some money to benefit themselves.

By offering a lot more college credits in high school, some of them won’t even have to do that task. In big cities such as Waterloo and Des Moines they offer a lot more college credits. Maybe it’s because they are such a big town and have lots of students in their school district to offer that opportunity.

Yes, lots of other schools do the same thing but they aren’t offering maybe enough to help. The whole topic is about giving kids that want to go to college the opportunity to pursue their dream and just do good things. By offering more college credits to make them better just gives them hope. College attendance would go up. Mainly, the future would be brighter by offering good things from attending college. By doing this you are giving many kids better chance and more opportunity to make it better.

Charles City High School should team up with NIACC or any other good college to have more opportunities for students to have more by making some common core subjects better. Me, currently being a high school student, I can relate to this. Kids in my grade wanting to go to college but can’t afford it can have a better chance. If we offer more opportunities. Mainly only in junior and senior classes you can get college credits. I understand it’s because they are a lot older but maybe the other grade should have a chance. In my opinion I think that they could be offered throughout the whole high school district.

To sum up my letter I’m trying to promote more college classes in public high schools.

Cinnamon Evans, CCHS student

Gap makes our economy unstable

Income inequality affects millions of people in the United States. We have to work to change income inequality because if we keep going at the rate we are, the economy will continue to destabilize.

To fix income inequality one of our top priorities should be to increase the minimum wage. Fixing the minimum wage to an amount at around $11 to adjust for inflation will help to do many things. If we increase the minimum wage then it will take people out of poverty. Taking people out of poverty will then work to increase buyers in the economy and help to decrease the difference between regular people and the top percent of people in our economy.

If the minimum wage doesn’t get raised then more people will stay in poverty and then most people will not be able to be constant contributors to the economy without help from the government or from loans which ultimately will increase the amount of people in poverty and increase the gap from middle class Americans and upper class American citizens.

Raising the minimum wage could also be a bad thing. If we raise it too much, too fast then people may lose the drive to compete for jobs and to want to have higher wages. If competition gets taken out of our current economic system then there will be fewer buyers making all of the things that I said would go well in the paragraph above, not go well and will eventually increase income inequality. To prevent this we would have to raise the minimum wage a little bit at a time over the next 5 to 10 years to slowly ease into the increased minimum wage to prevent people making minimum wage to lose all sense of drive and competition.

Increasing the minimum wage will take people out of poverty which will increase the amount of people that go to college. Increasing the education allowed to middle and lower class people will increase buyers which will ultimately decrease the wage gap between the middle and upper class and decrease income inequality.

Carter Johanningmeier, CCHS student

 

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