Domhoff Wealth Income And Power Summary

Daniel Solis

BUS-109

Who Rules America?

After reading Wealth, Income and Power by G. William Domhoff I was truly shocked about the facts that were given. Does high income and a lot of wealth lead to power? Does power lead to a high income and lots of wealth? First, let‘s first define what wealth and income is, according to the article, wealth is the value of everything a person or family owns, minus any debts. Income, again according to the article is what people earn from work but can also be from dividends, interest and any rents that are paid to them on properties they own. Now we will look into greater detail, is this really true? What can we do to fairly distribute to wealth income and power? Is the current distribution badly effecting

When it comes to income the wealthiest people usually have the most income. So when it comes to income, it was stated in the paper that people believe that taxes are highly progressive and top 1% pay the most taxes received. Both are wrong, payroll taxes are ignored and the mostly payed by people who have an income below $100,000. What I find the crazy about that is most people do not even know that, I believe we need to be more educated about this, this is a real problem that needs to be fixed. In article by Steve Hargreaves he states a lot of reason why income inequality is bad. One reason is that this gap in income suppresses economic growth and job growth. The middle class is too weak to support consumer spending. In a Ted Talk I read that another reason why income inequality is bad is that people do get the same opportunity. Some people are limited to less resources. People against the inequality would say that the top 1% are taking a huge piece of the pie and they have shrunk the pie. Now let’s look at the other side and see why some might say income inequality is good thing. One reason why we can say it is a good thing is that the top 1% of people taking 17% of all income is these people that have the money know what to do with it. They are educated, so if we keep taxing the wealthy and transferring money to the working class the money is not used in the right

Let’s define what power is first, according to the paper power has to do with the ability to realize wishes, or reach goals. This paper did a great job on seeing how wealth and income distinguish power. As far as wealth, things like stock ownership control companies. So since these people own so many stocks it is almost like they are controlling the company and evidently that effects society. People want to have things that society values the most so the most people that have those things have the most power. One point that the paper made and I cannot agree with more is people want their own property, go on vacation and live in nice houses. Those values are distributed unequally so these values are considered power. Income can also be looked at as a power indicator. One way people with high income have so much power is taxes. We would think they pay more in taxes but in reality they pay 30.8% of their income taxes and that is a little less than then what the 9% below them pay. Income did grow by 27% since 1979 but 33% of those gains went all to the top 1%. So what can we do to distribute the wealth and income? Wealth is closely tied with income. With that being said the middle class needs to be cheaper. Every dollar that they save goes to their wealth. Another way to distribute the wealth and income equally is redistribution. According to an article by