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On August 7, 2015, Jonathan Tasini writes on Salon:
This article is excerpted from The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America by Jonathan Tasini (Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2015) and is published here with permission of the publisher. The book will be available nationwide on September 8th, which is Sanders’ birthday. For more information.)
“What a lot of people are feeling [about Sanders] is that there is somebody speaking to their issues. I think that’s why you’re seeing so many people come out. People are sick and tired of corporate America, both Republican and Democrat.”
—Troy Jackson, a logger from Allagash and former majority leader of the Maine Senate
Everyone cares about how the government spends its money, especially people who embrace the idea that smart, progressive government is a force for good. From the time he was watching taxpayer money as mayor of Burlington right up through his service in the House and Senate, Bernie has always looked for the proper balance between, on the one hand, strong, effective programs that look out for the people and, on the other, financing those programs by asking people who earn more to pay their fair share.
Even before his current campaign for the White House, Bernie thought through, in ten easy steps, a plan to meet human needs by raising hundreds of billions of dollars from the wealthy and corporations, and by reducing wasteful spending. Not a single dime from the list below would come from working people. —J.T.
Ten Fair Ways to Reduce the Deficit and Create Jobs
At a time when we are experiencing more wealth and income inequality than at any time since the 1920s, and when Wall Street and large corporations are enjoying record breaking profits, I believe that we should be asking the very wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. That way, we will not only lower the deficit but we will bring in enough revenue to invest in our economy and create the millions of new jobs we desperately need.
From both a moral and economic perspective, we must not balance the budget on the elderly, the children, the sick, working families, and the most vulnerable.
Here are 10 examples of how we can raise revenue and reduce spending in a fair way.
1. Stop corporations from using offshore tax havens to avoid U.S. taxes. Each and every year, the United States loses an estimated $100 billion in tax revenues due to offshore tax abuses by the wealthy and large corporations. The situation has become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the “home” to more than 18,000 corporations.
The wealthy and large corporations should not be allowed to avoid paying taxes by setting up tax shelters in Panama, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas or other tax haven countries. The first bill that I introduced in the Senate (the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act) would raise more than $580 billion over the next decade by eliminating the most egregious corporate offshore tax haven abuses.
2. Establish a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street speculators. Both the economic crisis and the deficit crisis are a direct result of the greed and recklessness on Wall Street. Creating a speculation fee of just 0.03 percent on the sale of credit default swaps, derivatives, options, futures, and large amounts of stock would reduce gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the job-creating productive economy, and reduce the deficit by $352 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
3. End tax breaks and subsidies for big oil, gas and coal companies. If we ended tax breaks and subsidies for big oil, gas, and coal companies, we could reduce the deficit by more than $113 billion over the next ten years. The five largest oil companies in the United States have made over $1 trillion in profits over the past decade. ExxonMobil is now the most profitable corporation in the world. Large, profitable fossil fuel companies do not need a tax break.
4. Establish a Progressive Estate Tax. If we established a progressive estate tax on inherited wealth of more than $3.5 million, we could raise more than $300 billion over 10 years. [I] introduced the Responsible Estate Tax Act that would reduce the deficit in a fair way while ensuring that 99.7 percent of Americans would never pay a penny in estate taxes.
5. Tax capital gains and dividends the same as work. Taxing capital gains and dividends the same way that we tax work would raise more than $500 billion over the next decade. Warren Buffett has often said that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary. The reason for this is that the wealthy obtain most of their income from capital gains and dividends, which is taxed at a much lower rate than work. Right now, the top marginal income tax for working is 39.6%, but the top tax rate on corporate dividends and capital gains is only 23.9%.
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/07/10_ways_to_make_the_economy_work_for_everyone_partner/
One of the ways that Bernie Sanders needs to embrace to make the economy work for everyone, that is not identified by Jonathan Tasini as critical to Sanders leading a movement, which seeks to unite multitudes of fundamentally propertyless capital owners and under-capitalized citizens who believe it is time to take back America from special interests, the economics of greed, and the influence-peddling power of lobbyists in Washington and the money they employ to buy our government, is to reform the system to enable EVERY child, woman, and man to become a wealth-creating, income-producing productive citizen through their personal ownership of FUTURE capital assets.
Sanders has floated numerous good solutions, including broad support for empowering EVERY child, woman, and man to become an OWNER of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets, even though his focus at the moment is limited to creating worker cooperatives and corporations that are employee owned using the structure of an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trust.
Bernie Sanders now needs to FULLY encompass the policies and program embodied in the Agenda of the Just Third Way, which PERFECTLY complements Sanders sense of economic and social justice and provides far more effective tools that reform the system and result in inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic and social justice.
To grasp this big picture Agenda, I suggest that one starts with this set of slides on the Just Third Way: http://www.cesj.org/…/just-thir…/graphic-overview-intropage/
Especially see the last slide showing how all parties would create interest-free money to enable every citizen to receive an equal “capital credit allotment” quarterly or annually to take to their local bank to purchase full-dividend payout corporate shares representing new and transferred income-producing shares in a more sustainable and non-inflationary private sector economy. After taking out a one-time loan servicing fee and a risk premium on the ability of the issuing corporation to generate future pretax profits to repay the cost of the loan, the bank would approve the “bill of exchange” to enable the citizen to purchase the shares for the citizen’s tax-sheltered “Capital Homestead Account” or “CHA.” The CHA is a high-powered form of IRA (Individual Retirement Account) that allows every citizen to receive from his or her local bank the financial means to leverage the local bank’s capability to create capital credit to invest specifically in viable capital asset project formation backed by “future savings” in the form of tax-free future profits.
The Agenda of the Just Third Way was developed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org). Norman Kurland, President of the CESJ argues, “The haves represent a tiny fraction of humanity. Our ideas will split them between those who see our point and understand that they would benefit everyone without taking anything away from them during their lives, and those who want to keep ownership in an exclusive club. The latter cannot publicly attack the institution of private property without threatening the legal foundation that gives them their monopoly over the money system and the ownership system.”
Bernie Sanders is the ONLY candidate for president that will provide leadership to awaken all American citizens to force the politicians to follow the people and lift all legal barriers to universal capital ownership access by every child, woman, and man as a fundamental right of citizenship and the basis of personal liberty and empowerment. The goal should be to enable every child, woman, and man to become an owner of ever-advancing labor-displacing technologies, new and sustainable energy systems, new rentable space, new enterprises, new infrastructure assets, and productive land and natural resources as a growing and independent source of their future incomes.
The Just Third Way agenda, led by Bernie Sanders, will motivate virtually every demographic group that could form the basis of a new progressive majority in America, one driven by the people power that can transform our politics and ultimately result in a FUTURE America that can support general affluence for EVERY child, woman and man.
So what say you Bernie, are you the ONE that will embrace these high ideals and great aspirations that need to be at the forefront of the next great era of progressive leadership of America?
