On March 4, 2015, Jim Puzzanghera writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Chief executives at the largest U.S. companies are more optimistic about the state of the economy, and their outlook for sales over the next six months is the best in three years, according to a new survey.
Expectations for capital spending and hiring also increased, according to the quarterly findings released Tuesday by the Business Roundtable, a trade association of CEOs at major corporations.
“The U.S. economy and the job outlook are starting the year in a stronger position than 2014,” said AT&T Inc. Chief Executive Randall Stephenson, the group’s chairman.
Expectations for economic growth this year improved to 2.8%, up 0.4 percentage points from the fourth-quarter survey. But Stephenson said the economy still was performing below its potential.
The survey’s overall index rose to 90.8 in the first quarter of the year from 85.1 in the fourth quarter of 2014. The index’s long-term average is 80.5 within its range of 150 to negative 50.
It dropped to negative 0.5 at the depths of the Great Recession and has reached as high as 113 during the recovery.
Eight in 10 survey respondents said they expected their company’s sales to increase over the next six months, up from 74% in the fourth-quarter survey. The figure, which had declined in the two previous quarters, was the best since 2012.
The group’s hiring index also increased slightly.
And the biggest change was in expectations on capital spending over the next six months, with about 45% of respondents saying they planned to increase spending. The figure was 36% in the fourth quarter.
Chief executives were persuaded to open their corporate checkbooks wider partly by the December vote in Congress for a one-year extension of $45 billion in tax breaks, mostly for businesses, that had expired at the end of 2013, Stephenson said.
The survey results showed that a “wave of capital investment” would come if the White House and Congress could agree on business tax reform that would lower the overall U.S. corporate rate, he said.
“There is probably nothing that will move this economy forward and drive capital investment faster than tax reform,” Stephenson said.
Another top priority of the group is getting Congress to pass new authority for the president to fast-track trade deals.
The White House and Republican congressional leaders support so-called trade promotion authority, but many of President Obama’s fellow Democrats oppose it out of concern new deals will lure U.S. jobs abroad.
“We expect, and will be pushing to get, something done in the first half of the year,” Stephenson said.
The first-quarter survey asked a special question about trade and found that increased access to foreign markets would boost corporate growth and U.S. hiring.
Stephenson had hoped the House already would be considering a trade promotion authority bill, but said “a lot of other noise has gotten in the way of that.”
One of the issues causing that noise has been the dispute over Department of Homeland Security funding.
The failure of the Republican-controlled Congress last week to pass a longer-term funding bill because of a dispute over Obama’s immigration initiative was “disappointing,” Stephenson said.
“From our view, the only responsible action for a governing majority is to pass a full DHS funding bill,” he said.
Later Tuesday, the House passed a Senate-approved bill funding the agency through the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30, without restricting the immigration plan.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-business-roundtable-ceo-survey-economy-20150303-story.html
This entire article is about financial benefits to CAPITAL OWNERS, without ever using the word OWNER. No matter what spin CEOs put on it, economic growth is anemic at the current 2.8 percent or so rate. Still, there is always some growth directly due to monies spent to expand and form new physical capital assets, which always end up furthering the value of the capital assets owned by the wealthy corporate elite owners.
Note importantly that the outlook for increases in the sales of products and services is due to access to foreign markets to boost corporate growth. Thus, the advocacy to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (TPP), which is certain to benefit an already wealthy ownership class by further enabling global corporations to amass even more economic inequality-causing concentrated capital asset ownership. As such, any consideration of passage should be halted if will not significantly broaden capital ownership, but instead further enrich the ownership interests of the already wealthy.
Of course this continual hogging of ALL future capital asset formation, whether within the United States or abroad, is ALWAYS justified because it will increase hiring and job creation in the United States. Thus, while the wealthy ownership class gets even more richer, the ordinary man and woman worker gets poorer and struggles with the crumbs trickled-down as slave wages––systematically denied access to the means of acquire and owning newly formed capital assets that grow the economy.
But no one in the media is writing about this issue––certainly not Los Angeles Times’ Jim Puzzanghera, who I have commented on his articles numerous times and emailed him as well. Result: No Response!
I am certain that Puzzanghera knows full well what being an OWNER of capital assets is all about, albeit probably betting on increases in the value of second hand, previously owned stock listed on the stock exchanges rather than full earnings dividend payout.
Yet, he NEVER addresses the issue of concentrated ownership, which his article alludes to and does not educate his readers as to what is really going on and how the system is rigged to benefit those who already are among the wealthy ownership class.
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man’s greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won’t use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
As a feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, who writes about the plight of the middle class and economic issues, Puzzanghera should be angry at the system and want to reform the system, but he NEVER ventures into the other-than-conventional-non-working solutions and ignores others that would empower EVERY citizen to become a capital owner. He, as well as other journalists, is part of the problem because he has the power of mass media behind him. He, as well as other far more wealthy capital owners have been able to enrich themselves working the system, but have not lifted a finger to acknowledge that they are rich because they own wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets. Nor have they spoken out about the necessity to broaden capital ownership.
Those who are overwhelmingly benefiting from the current unjust system, including unjustly over-paid CEOs, and in particular multi-millionaires and billionaires, such as, for example, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, whose names attract coverage, should be shamed for hogging capital ownership and not seeking to lift ownership-concentrating Federal Reserve System credit barriers and other institutional barriers that have historically separated owners from non-owners and link tax and monetary reforms to the goal of expanded capital ownership. Doing so would enable the poor and others with no or few assets (the 99 percenters) to overcome the collateralization barrier that excludes the non-halves from access to productive capital.
