I recently heard about a UC Berkeley study showing that children as young as preschool showed significantly different brain patterns when it came to reasoning depending on their parents income levels. The tots from a higher income showed a much higher ability to reason and were much more relaxed (mentally) then their less wealthy counterparts. Some might say that this is a detriment of the poor, that they are poor because they are less intelligent on the most basic of levels. But I think that it is more a detriment of the rich than of anyone else, because they, like all other forms of power on this country, are failing to fight the enormous gap between rich and poor.

Unlike my usual rants that point more to my encroaching insanity then any sort of coherent world view. I actually have some legitimate evidence regarding actions to either ignore or accelerate the income gap. Robert Franks writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the multiplier by which a major CEOs income is greater than the average salary has gone from 42 times higher in 1980 to 531 times higher in 2000, only 20 years later. In addition, Congress called for 70 billion in tax cuts for high income families in 2005, under the justification that they make more money because they work harder, and therefore deserve to keep more of their gross income.

My family is living proof that this not the case, although we did come from humble beginnings, we make an obscene amount of money each year that we most definitely did not earn in the dictionary definition of the word. My parent work hard, sure, but the work is not labor intensive, unless you want to argue that staring at a computer screen in the comfort of you home office is taxing. The fact of the matter is that we make most of our money because my Uncle had the good sense to get really good at something, and we used that exposure to start up a clothing company, which now supplies us with a whole lot of money with absolutely no time or effort required. This all goes to show how we, of all the people in the country, do not deserve a tax break.

If history has taught us anything, aside from the fact that lead plumbing is bad a good way to get your empire sacked by barbarians, its that, although humans are easily oppressed, they do have their limits. The American government learned this the hard way with our banana republics in South America. If America doesn’t learn from its mistakes, they shouldn’t count on the jingoist tempering that they’ve worked so hard on to stop those who they have been left behind to take back what’s theirs. Let’s end with a quote from economist Herbert Stein “If something can’t go on forever, it won’t”, I can only hope.
—Will Hawk