Primarily the rich have the resources to invest their money and create sources of income without actually having to work. They can invest a large sum of money into some sort of investment fund and live on the interest. Because they aren't tied down to a job or burdened with some of the struggles and problems associated with being poor they have the freedom of thinking of new ways to make more money. They have the time and money to devote to developing a business idea. They have the ability to try something new without the risk of their life being impacted by financial failure of the new idea. The poor man often has to "juggle" his bills and money in order to make ends meet always leaving him a few steps behind where he wants to be in life financially. If his car breaks down he will have to spend half of his rent money to get his car fixed so that he can get back and forth to work. By the time he can get enough money together to pay his rent he will probably have to pay late fees and other penalties for being late. After paying all of his bills, he might have $20 left over at the end of the week to purchase his daily essentials (food, soap, toiletries, etc.) and because he only has $20, he will have to buy it in smaller sizes and quantities until he can get to the next pay period. Smaller sizes and quantities are more affordable, however, more expensive in the long run. For the poor, its a vicious cycle where they are always in the state of falling behind every time they get ahead. I think that its also a state of mind. Its very common to hear stories of poor people who win the lottery and get rich overnight are back to being poor a few months later. Likewise there are some rich folks, like Trump, who manage to get back on top everytime they lose everything.

The rich have the power to keep it that way. Why would they want the poor to get any richer?

If we took all the money in the world and distributed it evenly among every person on earth, within five years most of that money would go back to same rich people you took it from. Why? Because those who are smart, who pay attention, who read between the lines when they have to, who know how to capitalize on ideas --- they always succeed in finding a method of controlling information, accumulating wealth, and getting Slack. Everyone else simply doesn't get it, get's bored of "the game", and will either move on to some get rich quick scheme they see on late night TV, or slave away on the 9-5 treadmill of bourgeoisie respectability. Access to information and knowledge of how to control and manipulate that information have been always been the key to money & power. For more on the subject of information = power = money check out http://www.slacksyndicate.com

While this is an oft-repeated phrase often believed true, there a great many examples to the contrary. There are many families whose patriarch made a vast fortune and the descendants are gradually spending it all without adding to the family wealth - these families are the rich getting poorer. There are likewise a great many middle and upper class families who came from poverty. I have personal experience with a family that came to the USA as refugees with no money or valuable possessions and quickly rose to middle-class. I believe this is a common occurance for other immigrants. My own grandparents lived in a clap-board shack. My parents were probably on the above-average side of middle class. I have heard statistical analysis that in the USA more people move up out of the lowest economic class than stay in it. The class itself does not shrink dramatically because new people get added to it by birth, immigration, alcohol or drug dependency, etc. In many other nations there just is little or no opportunity for the poor because of dysfunctional economy or government - which is why so many want to immigrate to the USA.

If you come from a family which has money, often the principle is invested, producing more money. There are trusts for members of the family, which usually are funded primarily by accumulated interest, dividends, money produced by investing the principle. Some of this money is also reinvested, producing more money. With this system in place, you never actually spend your money; it works for you, producing more. Also, not all people who come from money are frivolous dillitantes like Paris Hilton. Most are well educated and work, producing additional income. Poor people often have to take whatever education they can afford. Often, the struggle just to avoid homelessness and feed the children can just suck the drive right out. Glassy-eyed, tense, & weary, in front of the tv isn't the best atmosphere for fostering learning. Some children are embarassed by shabby clothes, being a free lunch kid, not being able to keep up with peers and cut school. A poor education means employment opportunities which pay even a living wage shrivel up. About the only thing pleasurable and affordable is sex. An so, the next generation of poor people is created.

The song goes: There's nothing surer The rich get rich and the poor get children In the meantime In between time Ain't we got fun Nevertheless, over 80% of the population in the United States and Canada, for example, have a negative net worth. If you add up the value of all of your property and subtract your debt (e.g., student loan, mortgage, car loan, home improvement loan, credit cards, and all of your other financial obligations), you have a net worth of less than zero. You are not one of the wealthy. A significant percentage of the remainder have a relatively small positive net worth, meaning they are in a position to potentially generate a small amount of personal wealth. The top one per cent account for almost all of the total wealth. They are able to manipulate this resource in such a fashion as to cause it to grow. Some is first generation wealth. Most isn't. You don't have to have brains or work hard if you already have enough wealth; your money, your invesment bankers, and your accountants can do the work for you. A modicum of luck is also involved, although few are willing to acknowledge it.

I agree with most of the above, but are we really talking money terms here. Looking at Bill Gates, does he have any kids, I honestly do not know. Many families in the poor money situation, are richer then money rich people, because they have kids, which cost a lot to bring up, so will remain financially poor but rich in love and friendship and joy towards each other. Many rich in money are in real terms greedy. Many rich people have no one to leave thier money when they cark it, so what good is having all the money in the world and lose it all in death? In Australia recently, we had an insurance co go crashing, HIH, it was caused by rich men being more greedy even when they in them selves had more money then they could ever spend. Alan Bond was another Aussie, that had greed for more, as was Chris Skase. I think being poor and honest is much better then being rich and greedy, never having enough always more more in their terms, however as we have seen, they cheat and steal from everyone around them and think they have power, until they get caught, then suffer in the same cell as the junkie next door.

If you are poor and come into wealth you might not have the skills to use your wealth to your advantage. I knew a man who came to this country 21 years ago from Greece not knowing any english. He got a job washing dishes in a hotel. He won the lottery paying him $28,000 for 20 years. He quit his job, bought a house, a fur coat for his wife and a Cadillac. 20 years later he came back to the same hotel to ask for his old job. He needs money to pay the rest of the mortgage. He still never learned english. He is worse off than he was before.

Because the richer are smarter! No, it's actually for a variety of reasons. The rich tend to have family or friend business connections, who are willing to hire their friends' adult child(ren). Another reason is trust funds. Finally, the richer tend to have access to the best of everything such as education. Clearly, the rich; overall, tend to be rich because they have opportunities available to them such as expensive schools, which ensure that they're successful and a plethora of other reasons. To attend an exceptional university, costs money. Something poor peopel don't have. Furthermore, if you'll take notice, most rich people have careers that require above-average, if not, genius IQs such as lawyers, doctors, stock brokers, investment bankers, etc. All of these professions pay the most money, but also usually require a great deal of money, in terms of attending universities, in order, to get the education necessary, in order, to acquire these high-paying jobs. Conversely, the poor don't have access to the best educational facilities, the best teachers, trust funds, investment opportunities, etc. Add to the simple fact that some, if not, many poor people suffer from low self-esteem, lack of motivation, having child(ren) at a younger age, dropping out of high school, and other factors, and you have a recipe for poverty. Clearly, there is no solution to ending poverty. Ultimately, due to the plethora of variables there is NOT one specific solution that can end poverty. As long as there is greed and people purposefully trying to prevent others from also getting equal educations, then a growing disparity between the rich and poor will continue to escalate as unfair as that may seem. I hope this helps to answer your question!

It;s the song of the deadbeat. I don't know any poor people that don't have a color tv. DVD players were $500 not long ago, now they are $50. That is because as the rich get richer the prices drop, so the poor get richer also.

My answer to this is that you might often see a rich person wearing a jersey from an ad campaign but you will hardl;y find poor people doing that instead they want a name-brand jersey to impress someone. So for me it is a matter of the rich not giving up their money that easily and the poor not being able to economise on the money that they have available to them... think about it... really

I'm really surprised to see a question as old as this one without what seems to me to be the most obvious answer. That may be because the answer is obvious to me but not to everyone. I'm not belittling anyone here. I only became aware of what now seems obvious to me a few years ago myself. First, there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy. Rich is having a lot right now. Wealth is measured by how long can you live on what you have right now. If you can manage to live on what you have for the next six months you have six months wealth. Whether what you have will last six months or not is dependant on your lifestyle. People who win millions in the lottery are often broke or bankrupt few years later because they adpopt a lifestyle that their assets can't support for any longer than that. Others manage to retire permantently on what they win because they don't spent it all right away. Whether one is wealthy or poor depends as much on a way of thinking as it does on how much you have. You can have the most positive attitude imaginable but if you have no money you are wealthy in a emotional sense but not monetarily. In order to gain or maintain monetary wealth requires emotional wealth, but one does not neccessarily need monetary wealth to have emotional weath. If the emotional wealth is missing, the only way to gain financal wealth is to win the lottery or have a wealthy relative pass away and leave you a lot of money. The problem then is that people lacking in emotional wealth tend to spend away their winnings and inheritance putting themselves right back in the financial situation they started in or worse. That is why a lot of finanially wealthy people speak of "poverty mentality". The term "poverty mentality" is not meant by most of them to be a slur or a putting down of poor people [I admit it is true of some but not the majority]. It is simply a way of referring to what a great deal of us are taught unwittingly by our parents, family, well meaning friends, and many others who have not learned themselves that emotional health and wealth must come first. Poor people are niether stupid, nor any less smart than the wealthy. Those who continually live in poverty simply have not been introduced to (or if having been inroduced to them have chosen not use) the resources that the wealthy use every day. Specifically the knowledge that how one thinks, talks and acts every day has everything to do with one's emotional and financial wealth. The wealthy practice habits that the poor do not. They are the one's you see refusing to leave the store without entering the transaction they just made into their check registers, and putting the neatly folded reciept into a safe place to be filed at home later. Every wealthy person I ever met has said that if you want to be wealthy, this is a habit you MUST adopt. People who do not do this never become wealthy. The Wealthy lead their lives practicing different habits than the poor. The irony is that in this day and age, the knowledge that the wealthy put to use every day is widely available to anyone that wants it. Wealthy people have been publishing books on what they know for many, many years now. Those who are willing to share what they know live by the philosophy "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime.". The fact is most people don't read them, and a lot who do don't trust what they are reading. Why? It is true that there are some fakes out there who get rich by doing nothing more than selling books and seminars on how to get rich. The fact is that for the most part this is not true. The poor generaly tend to have learned and been conditioned to have negative attitudes that they believe are "realistic" or "cautious", when in reality they are just reasons not to try something different than what they have learned all their lives. They haven't learned to embrace ideas like "The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results." rather they hold fast to "If it sounds too good to be true, it is." and therefore don't look any deeper when an idea looks "too good to be true". But what can NOT look too good to be true when one has learned all one's life that the rich can't be trusted and that everything a rich man or company may present to one as a way to improve one's life is not to be believed? Yet the same people will happily go down to the local box store to spend every spare penny they earn, believing they are "saving" money because the prices are so low and they get to bring so much stuff home for so little. Yet the cheap made in China junk they bring home breaks within a very short period of time and they then return to the box sotre to start the cycle all over again. And then blame the box store for selling them junk. Well, nobody can sell you junk if you refuse to buy junk. So how can someone not buy the junk when they can't afford to buy the stuff that doesn't break so fast? The answer is one that most don't want to hear. The answer is if you can't afford to buy the good stuff, don't buy. Period. If you're baulking at that concept it's because you have not been taught that idea. It's one of the principles that is daily habit for the wealthy (including the emotionally but not finacially wealthy). The opportunity to become wealthy, emotionally and financially is availabe to everyone in the world. The knowledge of how it is done is not, but it is availabe to everyone in the US. You just have to want ot find it. Don't ask another poor person for it. They don't have it. Ask the wealthy! Don't know anyone wealthy? Lot's of books are out there. Instead of getting a pizza this weekend, buy a book instead. They're in the self improvement and business sections of your local book store. When you get there notice how close together those two sections are (at least in a Borders). That close proximity is no accident. Of course, there are hucksters and even big businsses that don't have good principles (I feel that most of the big box stores are some of them). But for the most part, the wealthy of this country continue to become wealthier because they continue to practice the habits that made them wealthy in the first place. Here I will refer all to the book "The Millionaire Next Door" by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. If you haven't read it, it's well worth it. It changed my view of the wealthy big time! As to the poor becoming poorer? Frankly I'm not sure I agree that is true in the US. I think if you look at the overall lifestyle in this country, you will find that even the lifestyle of the poor is better than it was in the past. However, even if we assume that the poor ARE getting poorer: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because they all continue practicing the habits, lifestyles, and attitudes that cause either wealth or poverty.

First of all I would like to clear up a misconception, Intelligence has nothing to do with being rich, some rich people got there through hard work and dedication, but mostly, it is being born into a rich family that makes you rich. It’s our own fault, because we allow them to dictate our lives. Attention working class people THERE IS POWER IN NUMBERS, but we have to stand on the lawns of there million dollar homes and put a halt to the working and paying them money for utility bills. After all, the power elite own everything, all the oil rigs, power companies, credit companies, banks, shopping malls, and everything else that you can think of that requires us to pay for as services rendered; therefore, in a since, we are actually working for money that is given right back to the hands that provided it in the first place “Thanks for nothing”. Thank of it like this, We are the slaves of the power elite, they tell us “indirectly through media” what to eat, wear, and what we are worth, then pay us just enough to keep us alive, so that we can procreate and give rise to a new batch of working class. Then, they tell us how to spend the money we received by making sure we can not live without the necessary amenities such as, taxes, insurance, credit cards, and a fee for just about everything else. Therefore, I implore you, the working class people of America to collectively stand up to the wealthy and demand more from them. If they want us to keep on producing products and working for them, they would have no choice in the matter but to meet the demands of the people.

Because the rich keep on doing the things that made them rich and the poor keep on doing the things that made them poor. Best advice I ever got was to "watch what the poor people do, and don't do it".

"The Rich get Richer" because they are catered to. I am by no means rich, but i recently received a lump sum of money, put a downpayment on a condo etc. I have some leftover sitting in the bank. The bank in the past 2 months has charged me over $50.00 in transaction fees. Well in the past 2 months I have had some money in the bank. I threatened to take my business elsewhere if they did not reverse those charges. They reversed them. I don't think they would have if I had only had a couple of hundred dollars in the bank.

People act like people of wealth are pure evil. Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe they are rich because they are intellegent and work for want they want. The majority of poor people I know, not saying all of them, are lazy and uneducated. True they come from poor backgrounds but that is no excuse. Anyone can be wealthy...all you have to do is apply yourself...The rich get richer because they wrok hard and the poor get poorer because they refuse to.....call me a liar but there is no reason to sugar coat the truth... P.S. I refer to the majority of people in my previous statement...

The rich earns more money to invest more; the poor earns more money to spend more. If you go deep in to the above statement, you will realize the mentality of the so called "rich people", who simply have more money than what they spend periodically. In the case of "poor people", they always spend more than what they have, by lending money for interest, selling their belongings etc.

As long as the poor fail to vote this will be the case.

1. Because the poor don't vote. 2. Because often they haven't the type of education that enables them to work tax laws to their own advantage and because the rich have engineered the tax laws in their own favor. 3. The rich must laugh their asses off at the middle class idiots who vote republican. And they must laugh even harder att he working Joes, carrying their lunch pails who think that anything on the left is communism or socialism. Like Universal Health Care, for instance.

Compound Interest.

Our society is controlled by corporate interests who ensure that public policy and the tax code are designed to serve their interests at the expense of the less privileged.

God has given to the rich because they are moral people. He takes from the poor due to their failings.

Because with our system once you have money it is very easy to get more. If you have none it is bloody difficult. More or less :)

Capitalism. To much to explain, but play the game "Monopoly" and you'll get it.

maybe because the rich know a system that work. that getting them to get richer. for poor, maybe it lazyness or uneducated about the system. it not that poor are stupid. it just they need to apply themselves more to get out the rat-race.

the rich get richer and the poor get poorer mainly due to their economic momentum. this has a lot more to do with resource management skills than it does with education or any of that stuff (bill gates didnt finish college). some people can start off with a bit and then mismanage it and lose it, getting poorer. others know how to properly apply that little bit to make more.. and then make a bit more off of that and so on. it also has nothing to do with hard work, just "efficient" and "effective" resource allocation. ie, "work smart, not hard" which means you make more money with less effort. theres other factors involved as well. but to answer the question, its mainly just momentum.

I think the answer may be a lack of education about money. Our society doesn't talk about smart money management. You have to educate yourself. We think it is rude to talk about money. I think if we talked about money and were educated about it there would be a lot less personal debt and poverty. I wonder if we made financial education mandatory in schools would that be good for the economy that runs on consumer spending? We are now talking about a fix to the economy by giving consumers some money in their pockets to spend. We need to learn how to save.

i think society wants it that way like everyone said the rich can invest and make more but those who are rich and dont help poor especially children i have two words shame on you

In the United States that is not true. The rich do get richer, but the poor have moved up to where the middle class was a couple generations ago in terms of their possessions.

Watch every dime you spend. Write down every penny you spend and analyze your spending at the end of each month. You can always find holes in your spending and learn to hang on to more of your money. They say people are poor not because they dont make enough but because they spend too much.

As a poorer or should I say less fortunate individual I would like to give my opinion. When you come from struggle. When you come from poor and uneducated immigrating parents, life will more than likely be considerably much more difficult for an individual. I honestly feel that if a person can barely take care of themselves and struggle just to get by, you should not have children at all period. Your just adding to an ongoing problem. My parents screwed me over, literally! Ever since I was born they in no way, shape or form gave me any knowledge or encouraged me on how to be successful in the real world. They just had children because I guess it's standard for everyone to have a family. Whatever! My parents forced school on us leaving everything we learned up to school. I attended NYC public schools for 12 plus years and came into the world not knowing anything about how to be successful in the real world, not because I was a bad student, I was a good student actually, but because the NYC public school system is set up so a child will fail. Making sure poor children stay uneducated which will lead to a life of hardships and struggle just to get by in life and hence the saga continues. School was basically a nursery to house all the knuckle headed kids from the ghetto while their parents slave away at work just to make ends meet. I would get into it more but I can go on and on and on. I don't get it. As a less fortunate person I don't understand why many of the poorer people can't see what they are doing wrong or even know that they are doing anything wrong. Honestly I'm getting by myself on little to no money just to make ends meet but I'm doing much better than what I see from the people in poorer communities surrounding me. I know that I will be successful in this lifetime. I manage my money well for someone who came from nothing. I believe anything is possible you just need a strong will and driving force. And to anyone out there reading this that is trying to get up out the struggle just remember that always strive for better by continuing to grow and learn. Knowledge is in fact power. There's so much knowledge to attain never cut yourself short of it always keep an open mind.