America is a capitalistic society, although, actually it's not a true capitalist society as the game has been fixed to favor certain players over others, depending upon their connections with powerful vested and important interests in government, in justice, and in the administration of these things in the real world. This signifies that while the winners may not be predetermined or fixed forever, that there are privileged cliques of people, industry, and governmental authorities that rule over the masses of our society and thereby have accumulated both power as well as money.
Because America is a wealthy nation, many people are okay with this uneven distribution of money, especially so as America's propaganda machine does a stellar job of selling the illusion that just about anyone given the right circumstances can go from the outhouse to the penthouse in one generation, which encompasses what most people consider to be part and parcel of the American dream. The thing is not everyone can realistically be ridiculously rich, in fact, most people in America at the present time, are distinctly not as reported by the washingtonpost.com, as the bottom 60% of Americans have in aggregate just 3% of the net wealth in America.
The most significant problem with such a huge percentage of Americans that aren't really worth much, and that struggle day-by-day to make a living can be conceptualized by understanding that the GDP of a given country is based upon the finished goods and services that a country generates in which, there are basic necessities that every family needs such as: shelter, food, clothing, education, sanitation, and healthcare. If you were to picture someone that is worth one billion dollars, recognize that this family only can eat so much, only can buy so many clothes, take so many vacations, and so forth, and the great bulk of the value of his money would be set aside and either saved or invested, but not consumed. On the other hand, one billion dollars provided to one million impoverished people, would give each of those people, exactly one thousand dollars, of which they would almost for a certainty use that money to purchase goods that they need or require on an everyday basis.
Those that have way too much money typically aren't spendthrifts, and even when they behave like spendthrifts and purchase extra homes, private jets, yachts and other assorted big-ticketed stuff, most of that stuff sits unused or underutilized almost every day of the year, and consequently provides very little net good for society at large. On the other hand, those that are barely scraping by will utilize whatever funds that they receive for real purchases of clothes, food, car payments, insurance, and rental payments, with any extra money being spent on other assorted desirable items that catch their fancy.
The truth of the matter is when the lion's share of monetary assets are held in very few hands, the rich aren't going to do much with it because their most urgent needs have already been met, so other than banking it in one of its myriad forms this wealth no longer circulates, leaving those that have little or nothing, high and dry, with little or no opportunity to make money, because that wealth isn't theirs, won't ever be theirs, isn't accessible to them as theirs, making them very poor players in a rich man's world.