Saturday, August 07, 2004

Poverty Genes

As the Guardian reports, Tennessee GOP congressional candidate James Hart has some interesting opionions about genetics:
Hart, 60, vows if elected to work toward keeping ``less favored races'' from reproducing or immigrating to the United States. In campaign literature, Hart contends that ``poverty genes'' threaten to turn the United States into ``one big Detroit.''
Poverty Genes! Oh, it all makes sense now. Poor people are likely to have poor parents, and rich people are likely to have rich parents, so obviously poverty must be a disease with a genetic basis. Why had we not noticed this before? There must be a specific gene for poverty. If children of poor parents grow up to be poor themselves, it is not due to lack of opportunity or anything like that, it is because they inherited the Poverty Gene from their parents. If poverty is increasing, it is because irresponsible people with the Poverty Gene spread it to their offspring.

The short term solution to this would be to encourage rich people to have as many children as possible, so that they can spread the Affluence Gene. Even if we have to pay the rich to have kids, it would be worth it to society in the long run.

But the good news is that with advances in Gene Therapy, there could one day be a cure. Scientists could develop a retrovirus that could replace the Poverty Gene with the Affluence Gene, so a simple injection of this serum could turn poor people into rich people! The only catch is that the Anti-Poverty Injection would probably be very expensive. Oh, well, nobody ever said science was fair.

[For the humor-impaired: though the quote above is real, the rest of this article is, of course, a joke. I do not believe in a Poverty Gene.]

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