O Tempora!

Do you like your phone? Thank a rich person. The telephone was primitive and expensive when first introduced. My paternal grandparents’ family didn’t even have one during part of the 1930s because of the cost. Calling out of town was an extra expense until recently, when unlimited long distance plans became common. The cell phone, introduced 40 years ago, was at first primitive, bulky and expensive to buy and use. Now, just about everybody has one, and smart phones are becoming the norm. This progress was made possible by the people who could first afford phones – the rich.

Do you like having a job? Thank a rich person. Money-making enterprises are never founded by, say, a person living under the Bijou Street Bridge in Colorado Springs. Somebody with an idea and/or money to invest finds a thing or a service that people want. In producing the product, the entrepreneur earns more money and hires people. If the product becomes popular, the person hires more workers. We’ve seen a lot of this in the tech sector – companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google have become some of the most valuable. The wealth and jobs they have generated and the products they offer have made life much better.

The rich are much vilified by the left. Wealthy citizens are criticized for not paying enough taxes, when they pay a disproportionately high percentage of income tax. The top 1% pay about 37% of the income tax. The top 10% pay about 68%. But the bottom 50% pay only about 3%, and many of those pay nothing or get money back through the so-called Earned Income Tax Credits. The people who are most productive in our economy and who provide most of the employment for everybody else are also taxed the most.

I’m an early Baby Boomer. I grew up with lead everywhere, which must explain my stupidity.

When I was born, nearly all gasoline contained lead. I remember how I liked the smell of gasoline fumes and exhaust fumes. My dad told me that these fumes would make me sick. I didn’t intentionally sniff the stuff after I learned that. But a person has to breathe, so I probably got an average amount of lead from automotive emissions.

When I was little, all paint was oil-based and about half of the paint contained lead. I remember being about five and seeing painters use an electric coil to heat paint to the point of smoking before they scraped the paint off. I remember the smell of burning paint.

House gutters were soldered together by hand 60 years ago. I remember watching a workman do this. He used some kind of little stove to heat his iron, then joined the sheet metal and melted the solder into the joints. I thought this was very cool. And of course, I was exposed to some lead in the air.

Tinsel was once metal instead of plastic. Some of that tinsel was made of lead. I can remember lead tinsel from when I was about eight. The tinsel had to be lead – it was heavy and soft, and it melted and smoked when I dropped it across the tracks for my model train. I think the first time that happened, it was accidental, but it was so much fun to watch that I often did it intentionally.

During the same period as the tinsel experiments, my friends and I thought guns were great. We weren’t allowed near any real guns – my parents wouldn’t have one, and the other parents, if they had guns, certainly kept their children away from them. But we got vicarious satisfaction from collecting used bullets. Close to our neighborhood were shooting ranges related to a military school. We often went to these locations to gather the discarded brass casings. We also liked to dig in the target areas for the slugs, which were full of lead.

Copper plumbing used lead-containing solder until 1986. I don’t know what kinds of pipes were used in any of the homes I had as child, but if there were copper pipes, they were joined with lead-based solder.

Ink used to print books contained lead. I’ve always been an avid reader, so if there was lead in these poisonous publications, I absorbed more than the average child. My parents probably should have bought a TV instead of these vile tomes.

I was apparently exposed to a great deal of lead as a child. So I must be stupid.