On January 2, 2013, Thom Hartmann posts on his blog on the Thom Hartmann Show and on AlterNet:
For the past 32 years, Americans have been living a lie. It’s a lie that helps out rich people and screws working people, and it’s a lie that needs to be called out.
The people promoting this lie – most all of them rich people themselves – have been so good at promoting this lie that pretty much everybody believes it. It’s even asserted as fact, without contradiction, in the mainstream media. But it’s a lie.
The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment.
Thom Hartmann is completely illogical, believing that raising taxes will create jobs. But raising taxes and then offering to reduce or eliminate taxes on the condition that corporations finance their growth with the new issuance of stock sold to their employees using a justice management-designed Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trust would enable the employees to purchase stock in their companies using pre-tax dollars to pay of the capital credit loans out of FUTURE earnings. Otherwise, just raising taxes without an incentive to expand company ownership will just result in accelerated efforts to invest in technologies that replace the need for human labor and then accumulate the bulk of the money earnings through monopolized productive capital ownership.
Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
Hartmann wants to further tax extract to redistribute wealth, taking from those who already OWN America, making Americans even more dependent on the State, instead of ensuring that policies are adopted that broaden private sector individual ownership in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital investment. As the economy grows we would then be able to further gain efficiencies and productiveness through employing advanced technologies while simultaneously creating significantly more “customers with money” to purchase what the corporations can produce.
The fight should be to transform workers into capitalist owners. This is a necessary course of action because in a competitive global world, the competitive cost of production is critical to business success. Full employment is not an objective of businesses, nor are businesses any longer able to be loyal to long-term workers when competing globally. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs (using machines, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.) at a minimum in order to maximize profits for the owners. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The aero space industry is a perfect example of this ever-constant shift to the employment of non-human instruments to produce its products.
Hartmann is advocating that government-sponsored work creation is funded with redistributive earnings from capital owners. And labor workers are essentially demanding that they be paid more for the same or less work input, while the real gains in productivity are due to the employment of human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized automation, etc.––productive capital assets owned by the owners of the company. For American companies to develop and build new productive growth it will require investment in expanded productive capital assets. What the workers should be demanding is an opportunity, via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trust, to finance investment in their companies using pre-tax dollars that result in creating new employee owners in a larger company. Doing so will enable the workers to demand less wages and benefits as they gain more and more income sourced through their ownership shares in their companies and assure that American companies will stay productive on American soil rather than on foreign soil. By putting the focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION the entire range of American companies will be able to become more competitive globally because the companies will be able to invest in the most efficient employment of productive capital instruments to enhance their global competitiveness and profitability, which will benefit ALL owners, including the employee owners and other non-employee owners who can participate in ownership using other similar insured capital credit financial mechanisms.
http://www.alternet.org/simple-economic-truth-americas-super-rich-dont-want-us-know-about
