The Gap

What’s in a word? Perhaps very little, unless we’re talking about the word gap. No, I am not referring to that fashionable clothing department store with the commercials that give us those warm fuzzy feelings inside; I’m talking about the huge economic gap that has been taking this country by storm.
Many people represent something I like to call “Denialists.” No, you will not find it in the dictionary, but you will find them evenly dispersed throughout the land of America. Yup, can’t miss ‘em because they are the ones pretending that the middle class is secure and of a healthy number. They are the ones clinging to the new “American Dream” which is more disturbing to me than the original dream. Maybe you have heard of it? It is called, “Get rich, no matter what the cost!” This kind of mindset is generally located in that fun-loving guy or gal you meet and attempt to converse with about peace and community building ideas and their general response is a hearty laugh or an angry outburst. “How come the poor and middle-class deserve financial attention and us “richies” don’t?” might be something they would say. Of course, what a silly suggestion! Help those in need? I mean, look at where life has placed them! How about for once posing the latter thought with one slight variation: Look at where our system has placed them. Not all people in the low-to-middle-class range screwed up their lives by continuously making bad choices. Our system is a very difficult structure to break out of and to build upon it something more functional and satisfying.
It may be true that the top .1 percent in America is being taxed at a relatively high rate. However, the top .1 percent are making at minimum 1.3 million dollars a year. But, 1.3 million sliced in half is still 650,000 dollars a year. What a travesty that the “top dogs” must help us lowly workers. Sheesh, I’d be satisfied making $30,000 annually.
According to Princeton professor of economics Paul Krugman, “Middle-class Americans have been caught up in a rat race, not because they are greedy or foolish but because they’re trying to give their children a chance in an increasingly unequal society. And they are right to be worried: a bad start can ruin a child’s chances for life.” People in America’s middle-class are disappearing. However, it is not because our system is set up in such a quaint way that anyone can be bumped up to the upper class. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Here is the dirty, rotten truth: “The fact is that vast income inequality inevitably brings vast social inequality in its train. This social inequality isn’t just a matter of envy and insults. It has real, negative consequences for the way people live in this country” (Krugmen, “Confronting Inequality”). I know about some of these inequalities. I cannot marry in most states, adopt a child in most states or receive specific benefits from the government, at all. If I chose to be in the military, I could be easily discharged, without benefits, if someone found out I was gay or if I was honest about my sexual preferences (in which I would choose honesty). My presence, everyday, is questioned and on display anytime I do not walk “feminine enough” or if I want to hold my girlfriend’s hand. I have few ways, currently, of moving up in the system because of the inequalities between gays and straight people. Being fired from a summer job because of my orientation was my first wake up call, which shown light on the wall dividing heterosexuals from “other.”
In Europe, studies have been done throughout various countries, including America, to show the difficulty of moving from a lower class to an upper class (Krugmen). America, apparently, has one of the most tumultuous and resistant economic systems in the world. Parents often try to provide a good education for their kids by moving to a better school district, which is generally more expensive to live in. However, because they are “ranked” in the middle class, eventually face rising mortgages and are forced to file for bankruptcy, or worse, many of those people are forced to live on the streets. Sounds familiar, huh? Where is the money to ensure a better future for our kids? Why don’t we care more about these families who simply wanted to provide the best that they could for their children?
In our society, we pay our CEO’s roughly $1,000 an HOUR! Would you like to know what we pay the educators of our youth? They receive, in estimate, anywhere from $25,000 to $45,000 a year. At most, that’s around $123 a day. Hmmmm, something must be wrong with this set-up. We seem to punish those who are more intelligent and/or compassionate who choose to participate in life choices which involve helping people, such as our educators. We then continue this imbalanced cycle by rewarding jobs that are hollow and self-gratifying with incredibly high pay.
I like this guy a lot, so I’m going to quote him again. Paul Krugman also points out a curious “quirk” in our tax laws:

“Through a quirk in the way the tax laws have been interpreted, these [hedge fund] managers—some of whom make more than a billion dollars a year—get to have most of their earnings taxed at the capitol gains rate, which is only 15 percent, even as other high earners pay a 35 percent rate. The hedge fund tax loophole costs the government more than $6 billion dollars a year in lost revenue, roughly the cost of providing healthcare for three million children. Almost $2 billion of the total goes to just twenty-five individuals.”

What does this mean to the everyday individual? It means that a huge sum of money ($6 billion), which should be dispersed for more productive purposes, is being kept by big-wig managers who have little empathy for the “little people’s” lives that they are consequently stepping on. This is all because of the way our tax laws were written and the manipulating minds who want to wield the power of its man-made mistakes. I won’t even begin to talk about the Bush tax cuts that were passed, which only helped the top 1 percent. You can do that research on your own. This is, as Krugmen stated, “tax abuse.”
These are just a few of many economic imbalances in our country that contribute to the evident downward spiral our country has been facing. I could discuss this topic for pages more, but I will leave the responsibility to the reader to discover more about these inequalities in our system.
For my reader’s information, Paul Krugmen won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008, and has written many op-ed columns in the New York Times. He has recorded throughout the years some fascinating information about the way America’s economy functions and I recommend anyone daring enough to check out some of his articles. The quotes in this blog were taken from a chapter called “Confronting Inequality”, which was written in his book The Conscience of a Liberal.