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Minimum Wage and the Wealth Gap

            Every morning my father wakes up and goes to work construction. Doing something like this used to be enough but due to factors like the increasing gap in wealth this is no longer the case. Blue collar jobs like construction no longer provide enough to make a comfortable living. This is a direct result in the gap between the rich and poor. In a democracy run government it is crazy to think that the rich have all the power. In the words of the great philosopher Aristotle "In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme". Aristotle is stating that the majority have the power in a democracy. In order to fix the problem the lower class must use its power of being the majority and support higher taxes on the wealthy, a higher minimum wage and an increase in education opportunities for the poor as ways to narrow the wealth gap. .
             The gap on wealth has been going on for a very long time. One of the main problems is that the rich keep getting richer while the poor do the contrast. George Packer, a distinguished journalist and author of "The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline" brought this issue to life when he wrote, "In the 1970s, corporate executives earned 40 times as much as the lowest paid employee." This shows how truly prevalent the problem is and that was more than forty years ago. It was a problem that was on the rise then and now is even more so as by 2007 the gap had increased to an outrageously high 400 to 1. Just thinking about someone making 400 hundred times more than you while you are working hard and struggling to make enough money to live comfortably. Something that is really surprising to hear is what the people who are in the top percentage are doing when it comes to taxes. Our current tax system is set up to where there are many tax loopholes that allow the rich to legally cheat the system.


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