The Gilded Age: A Short Story

A tall, slender man is sitting on the balcony of his master bedroom in northern California. He is talking on the phone to the vice president of the Fortune 500 Company he inherited from his father, who had also acquired it from his father. The man is complaining about a desk chair that creaks when it is spun. As he grumbles in discontent, he spots a young boy who is fishing right on the edge of his seven acre beach lot. The young boy’s name is Jay; Jay is named after his great uncle who has been the only thing close to a father figure in his short life. It has now been a year and a half since he has seen him, almost a quarter of his life, and he has left the shack they had lived in to seek salvation elsewhere. He resorts to fishing the beaches for his meals and sleeping in nearby basements where it is warm. The man, whose name just so happens to be Mocoso, finished his rant and shooed the young boy off of his property. Situations like this are disturbingly prevalent in society today; two different families in the same city, or even the same street, can have lives ranging from one extremity to the other. It is not far off to say America is sliding back down to Gilded Age numbers when it come to inequality, and the nation needs to do something to fix it.
The top one percent in America is disentangling themselves from the rest of the pack and is closing in on owning as much as the rest of the population all …show more content…
We could conveniently do a form of the progressive tax where all types of income are taxed equally. As of right now, many of the ultra-rich are staying on top by finding a loophole in the tax system and exploiting it. They are investing in stocks and earning money that is classified as qualified dividends; these qualified dividends are taxed at a much lower rate, and, thus, the loophole is being surpassed without much creativity