Dateline February 2, 2012 Los Angeles Times: The headline reads “Using Taxes To Save Jobs.” I would rewrite that headline as “Using Taxes To Broaden Productive Capital Ownership, Save Jobs And Create Jobs.”
President Obama wants to use the tax code to promote manufacturing and deter U.S. corporations from shipping jobs overseas. This is a goal to support. However, given the policies suggested to …accomplish this goal the result will be to further concentrate ownership of productive capital in the 1 percent, leaving the 99 percent with the scraps of scarce and declining jobs due to the role of technology, which replaces labor workers with “machines.” President Obama appears not to be willing to discuss or does not understand the role of productive capital driven by technological innovation and science and the requirement for American workers and all citizens to become capital workers (owners), as well as labor workers, to earn a viable economic future.
Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant). The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.
President Obama’s narrow use of tax incentives will help to spur manufacturing and deter U.S. corporations from shipping jobs oversees but the so-called 1 percent rulers of corporations will still have rigged the financial system to enable this already rich ownership class to systematically further enrich themselves as capital formation occurs and technological industrialization spreads throughout the world, leaving behind the 99 percent to depend on income redistribution through make work “full employment” policies, government boondoggles, excessive military build-up, and social welfare programs. The unsatisfied needs and wants of society are not in that 1 percent or for that matter the 5 percent; those people are not the ones who are hurting.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, with tax incentives as an “urging” and “persuading” proposition, 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.
