Wealth is like Musical Chairs

Poverty in the United States is a big problem as around 35.9 million people are living below the poverty line, the poverty line is 1400 dollars in the US. According to (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_in_america_are_homeless)"Approximately 750,000 Americans are homeless due to lack of employment, mental illness, drug abuse, physical and mental abuse, lack of or low education, developmental disabilities and the stigma of HIV/AIDS( National Coalition for the Homeless,2001)." When reading this answer you can notice that this answer implies that those who are poor or homeless are mainly because of problems that involve their personal fault like illnesses or drug abuse. I think this answer can be true to my guess of 10% of the time the other 90% it is not because is is not always the poor people's fault. I think this is a ridiculous reason because even though as we discussed in class that some main theories to those in poverty is lower expectations, subculture of poverty, kids that are influenced that by throwing out their education they win by loosing, etc, but one main significant reason to why poverty is consuming most of the Untied States is because there just is not enough damn opportunities provided for those trying to get out from under the poverty line.
In class we demonstrated a number of different reasons and explanation of poverty in America by using chairs. First we played a game of musical chairs. Everyone should be familiar with this game, there are only a limited amount of chairs or "slots" for people to claim until they have no choice to sit out as not all are willing to fight or kick each other for a seat. Comparing this game to poverty the chairs are suppose to represent number of opportunities such as employment or aids such as health care or food stamps, etc. People have to fight for their "chair" and those who cannot fight are not helped at all and are even blamed for their lack of will power to fight for those opportunities and are even blamed for being lazy.
When learning in class about the wealth distribution in the United States, it is really shocking how unfair it is as there is that 1% of people who claim 17.5% of the wealth the the US as the bottom 60 million only have 2.2% of the wealth. To visually demonstrate this unfairness to the class we again used a line up row of chairs. Each chair represented I think 5% of the wealth. In the front of the line of chairs the one percent or the one person claimed 5 of the chairs all the himself. As the next one person claimed 4 of the chairs, the next two people had to chair four chairs, and the numbers shrink and shrink till people become cramped at the end of the live where around five people are so are cramped up and are forced to chair one or two chairs. The cramped up people at the end of the row represent the huge amount of people who are in poverty and only get the tiny percent of wealth compared to those three or four people in the front of the row that are living large. This is clearly an unfair distribution but ironically it is an example for how the wealth is distributed in the United States.
Lastly, with another game of musical chairs, this time the game was a little different as some of the chairs were claimed by certain people in the class. These three people represented the rich. As the game went on, more and more chairs were claimed by the same people as more people where being booted out of the game. In the end of the game, all the chairs were claimed by the same three people and for those did not have a name on a chair we either had to fight for a chair without a name on it or we had to give up. At the end there was only one chair left that was not claimed. If i could remember the last chair was claimed by Kevin Williams, the rest of us were being blamed for our lack of will and our laziness for not fighing for the chair as that oppourtunity could have been open to anyone. The last chair that was not claimed is to signify how there is always that one tiny and almost impossible to get oppourtunity to claim so that the poor are able to fight for it and can never mention that there were no opportunities and are made to blame themselves for not being able to claim that oppourtunity. Again, there are not enough opportunities because all the opportunities are already claimed by the rich. Those who are poor wish they were middle class, and those who had claimed 4 chairs wished they had the next ran up claiming 6 chairs. It just shows how the people, even those who are rich enough just look up to wanting to be those who are richer. What about those under poverty, are they really being helped enough? Those who are rich get so much opportunities already. Even if there is certain welfare and aids for those who are poor the tax is the United States does not help either. The tax in the United States is mostly regressive which basically means that those who are poor pay a higher percent of income then those who are rich. With this new knowledge learned in class I think the reasoning on that website of people in poverty because of their own fault should definitely be changed as it is not always the people in poverty's fault and is the system in the United States for not giving enough opportunity to be blamed.