ABSTRACT
One of the most important areas of debate in recent decades between conservatives and liberals concerns the extent to which economic inequalities, and especially the gap between the rich and the middle class and poor, have been increasing in the United States. Nearly one-third of all officially poor people had no health insurance in 1997. The most effective way to reduce poverty and unemployment is to permit the rich to get richer—the trickle-down theory or supply-side economics—because their increased spending trickles down to benefit all other segments of society proportionately. Liberal-leftist claims of a growing gap between the rich and the middle class and poor are based on faulty statistical analyses. Reaganomic policies have had the effect, intentionally or unintentionally, of entrenching plutocracy by making the rich richer and the middle class and the poor poorer and by eliminating needed welfare programs and productive areas of public spending and employment.
