The American dream is something every American would like to believe in. We are taught that everyone has equal opportunity to everything we may need to live. But is that true? If everything is so equal, how are there still so many people that are living in poverty? Unless born into a rich family, people have a hell of a time making it through life. Just as Jennifer Smith states in “Waking Up from the American Dream,” there is literally hardly any connection between how hard one works and how much money they make (154). Many people think that it is the people living in poverty’s fault for being there, but in reality, the greed of others is one of the main causes.

Politicians spend millions of dollars campaigning about how much they are going to “change” and help the poor. In the article “Poverty: One Definition at a Time,” Linda Miller defines social justice: “we are responsible for one another, and we should ensure that all have equal chances to succeed in life” (151). When people are forced to give more money to help everyone else, it puts them closer to poverty as well. The middle, working class is having to pay so many taxes to help “the poor” that it is making them struggle as well. R.T. Johnson quotes John Goodman from Forbes in his article “Perspectives on Poverty,” and emphasizes the fact that $15 trillion has been spent to “fight poverty” since 1965, and now $1 trillion a year, yet poverty is higher at 16%, than when it started at 14% (156). Obviously this government “aid” isn’t helping anyone at all; it is merely making it worse.

With the help of the government, everyone would like to believe that there really is an equal opportunity out there for all people to succeed and make their way in the modern world. The reality shows that it is clearly a rigged competition. There are very few people that hold most of the wealth or money in our world, yet there are billions of people working beneath them to make their money. Employers and CEOs are so obsessed with earning the most amount of profit these days that they forget about the well-being of people. This is resulting in low hourly wages and poor benefits for the employees that are slaving their lives away, working forty or more hours a week. “The Causes of Poverty,” by Robert Tressell, illustrates how the majority of society is working their lives away in poverty just so the few rich people can continue to live in wealth without hardly working at all. Smith hits the nail right on the head when she says, “compare Justin Bieber’s income to that of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is clear who made a greater contribution, and that person did not make the most money” (154). Citizens can work and make huge contributions to society, but they are not receiving a paycheck that equally reflects the amount of work done. Typically, those born in poverty often stay in poverty, and those born wealthy will stay wealthy. Although it is true that the education to move forward in the social stratification is available to everyone, it is also true that people can’t always afford it. The price of tuition has skyrocketed, and those in poverty can’t afford to pay for the education unless they get even farther into debt doing so. The cycle is unable to be broken due to the greed of others.

Because people are so money hungry and feel the need to profit off of everything, some individuals go without food every day. Organic, and actual nutritious food that is good for the human body, is outrageously priced, and to feed a whole family on it every day would cost a fortune. Food pumped with chemicals, that takes factories and extra money however is costing the public less money. It doesn’t make sense that the plants, freely and naturally growing out of our Earth, is costing so much more to have access to it. It is pretty much forcing people to eat unhealthy unless they have the resources to pay otherwise. No one was ever given ownership of the Earth to take what it naturally produces, and make money off of it. George Dowdell says in “The Root Causes of Poverty,” “there is sufficient food produced in the world to give everyone 3,000 calories per day. Yet obesity is common while so many suffer from the damaging effects of undernourishment.” Corporate greed is making it so only some people can afford food even though there is an abundance of it.
It is often believed that in most cases of poverty, the people are to blame for being where they are. They either don’t want to work or they are just lazy and want to get government assistance to live. But once someone is in poverty, or born into poverty it is a very hard cycle to break free from. Even after getting a college degree or working three jobs, it is still not guaranteed that enough money will be made to pay for all of the costs of living and then have some left over. The person whose dad is CEO of a company will easily be brought into that company without having to do anything, and make the same amount of money as someone that went into $100,000 debt to pay for school to get that position. Few people are lucky enough to catch a break and move out of poverty, but for the rest of people, they are trapped in a never ending cycle.

Tressell couldn’t have described “how the rich stay rich” better than how he did: “1. Take what belongs to all 2. Make others work to produce it and 3. Charge them to buy back what they have produced” (2). It is a cruel world out there full of greed and selfishness. Poverty has been around for many years, and it has only gotten worse. Until people can stop being greedy and trying to have power over things that weren’t given to them to control, the world will never change.