Columnist Michael Hiltzik writes in is op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times on May 9, 2012:
“European voters weren’t reacting only to the inconvenience and harshness of austerity; they were also driven by evidence that it doesn’t work. Washington should be paying attention.”
“Washington, which remains fixated on deficit-cutting while the economy continues to sputter along, should be paying attention. It’s not as though the ineffectiveness of austerity as a growth nostrum is any secret.”
Economist Nouriel Roubini doesn’t think much of premature austerity. “The Eurozone has an austerity strategy but no growth strategy,” he observed recently. Without that, Roubini said, austerity and reform become “self-defeating” — not only will the absence of growth worsen government deficits, but “the social and political backlash eventually will become overwhelming.”
While government can lead the way out of the continuing economic depression, it is imperative that government policies and program stipulate and require that as a perquisite to being awarded government contracts and/or grants that the companies receiving the “investment” substantiate that they are significantly broadening the private, individual ownership of their companies as they use the monies to expand.
It is imperative that America puts itself on the path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice by connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to newly invested productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth.
At present the United States economy, nor for that matter any other economy does not operate as a private-property democratic-capitalist, free-market economy. What needs to transpire is an understanding of binary economics along with instituting credit mechanisms that will implement the goal of broadening productive capital ownership in ways wholly compatible with the U.S. Constitution and the protection of private property.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120508,0,1425491.column
