Taylor Bye, Chapter 9, Question #6

Wheelan starts out this chapter with the President getting chucked in the head by a horseshoe and waking up from a nine month coma induced by this encounter with the horseshoe, asking about the "numbers" of the country. This might've been just a humorous anecdote but he uses this joke he wrote lo those many years ago when he was a speech writer for the governor of Maine to illustrate what matters when measuring the success of America's economy.

Wheelan claims that if the President were actually to have had his head hit by a horseshoe and slip into a coma for nine months, the first national number he would inquire about upon his coming to would be the gross domestic product or the GDP, which is the measure of the total worth of all the goods and services produced in the nation. Wheelan then goes on to explain how this is just one of many ways to measure the health of the economy. 

The passage I'm going to write about is actually going to be in two, but only because I think they both link together. Two other ways the President would be able to tell if America's economy was going down the toilet or staying firmly on the sink counter (weird metaphor, I know, but you get my drift) are poverty and economic inequality. 

Funny enough, my dad and I had a lengthy debate about whether poverty was necessitated by society today on the ride home from school. This was also explored in last class' reading assignment. But I digress into the idea that poverty is relative. This is where I think the tagline for this chapter, "is my economy bigger than your economy?" is so appropriate. Poverty is measured by the poverty line but, as we saw in today's class' chart, the poverty line can be moved. In comparison to the "rich", the poor are getting poorer but in comparison to how poor the poor were in the '90's compared to the 2000's, the poor were actually getting "richer". Which leads me to the next part of this passage that I found fascinating: economic inequality.

This too was a topic I had previously discussed today, other than in class. It's one of the potential debate topics for this season. With that being said, I can assume that this is quite a debatable topic. It goes back to our pie metaphor. It's not just the size of the pie (like the gap between the poor and the rich) but also the slice (like the "then" and "now" of the poverty situation in America). 

I believe these two topics intertwine so readily is because the relativity of poverty can create a greater, or smaller, degree of economic inequality. And atop that, the idea that we take these two very organic, very changeable factors and rest the success rate of the country upon their shoulders is utterly astonishing and fascinating. It makes sense, of course, but it amazes me that such a big, important structure (America) is built on such fluctuating numbers.