The Growing Division Between the Rich and the Poor Leading to Increasingly Severe Human Rights Issues in the United States

The size of the middle class in the United States continues to shrink. As reported by the Associated Press on May 13, 2016, 90 percent of households from the urban middle class in the United States were faced with increasingly worse situations, and many of them fell out of the middle class. A research report published by Gallup on September 20, 2016, shows that the percentage of US citizens who categorize themselves as being middle or upper-middle class has dropped from an average of 61 percent between 2000 and 2008 to 51 percent in 2016. This means that the quality of economic life for about 25 million US citizens has plummeted drastically. A report released by the Pew Research Center on May 11, 2016, shows that the middle class no longer holds the majority in nearly 25 percent of metropolises in the United States.

Poverty rates remain high in the United States. Statistics from the United States Census Bureau in 2018 show that the number of poor people in the United States reached 38.1 million, with a poverty rate of 11.8 percent. The 2018 annual report made by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) stated that there was an underestimation in the officially published US poverty rates, and it estimated that 43.5 percent of the US population (about 140 million people) live in straitened circumstances or earn a low income. According to a report released by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality in 2017, the overall poverty rate in rural areas in the southern United States is 20 percent, and the poverty rates for African Americans and for African-American women in this region are 33 percent and 37 percent, respectively. In the rural areas of the western United States, the poverty rate for Native Americans is as high as 32 percent.