On July 11, 2012 this article was posted on The Economic Collapse Blog:
The headline to this article states that there will never be enough jobs in America again.
How could that possibly be true?
Well, the sad truth is that it is very hard to make a profit on an employee in the United States today.
Every year, the control freaks that run things just keep dumping more taxes, more laws, more regulations and more demands on employers. Hiring even a low level employee today is very complicated and very expensive.
These days a lot of small business owners have decided that it is simply not worth the hassle to hire more employees. If you can’t make a profit on them, what is the point?
If there was going to be a major rebound in hiring, we would have seen it by now. Corporate profits are at an all-time high as I mentioned earlier. How much more money do they need to make before they start hiring?
But I don’t blame them. Our politicians have loaded the system with plenty of incentives NOT to hire workers.
Today, many employers are trying to replace as many employees as possible with computers, automation, robotics and other forms of technology. Those are jobs that are not ever going to come back.
However, sometimes human labor is still actually needed.
But instead of hiring American workers, many big corporations are taking advantage of the emerging “one world economy” and are setting up shop in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
So how are American workers supposed to compete with that?
The truth is that they can’t.
Today, you aren’t just competing for jobs with your neighbors. Your competition also includes millions upon millions of hard working people on the other side of the globe that will gladly work 12 hour shifts in nightmarish conditions for a dollar an hour.
The United States has been losing millions of jobs to lower wage countries, and the fierce competition for the jobs that remain is driving down wages in this country.
As a result, many of our greatest cities that were once the envy of the entire world have become cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness.
We are going to continue to bleed jobs because both major political parties are fully convinced that merging our labor pool with the labor pool of the rest of the world is a grand idea.
U.S. workers can’t compare with low wage workers on the other side of the world. It is simply no contest.
In fact, we should probably be celebrating that things are still as good as they are.
In the future they will be a whole lot worse.
Now the next major downturn is rapidly approaching.
When it hits, the unemployment rate is going to go well up into the double digits.
At the moment, our failing economy is being propped up by unprecedented amounts of debt.
When our debt-fueled false prosperity ends, the true horror of the decay of our economic system will be revealed.
If you think it is hard to find a job now, you just wait. What is coming is going to be a total nightmare.
This editorial REALLY GETS IT.
Sadly, our leaders are not prepared and are not preparing the American people for the coming economic collapse and the next Great Depression, due to their lack of wisdom and foresight to understand that full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. 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––as the use of “machines,” superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. to produce products and services.
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.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. These top 1 percent will seek out national and global markets to sell their products and services to and abandon any market that cannot sustain consumption.
Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in upheaval.
The BIG ISSUE, which is the cause, is not being presented or discussed!! This solution is ENTIRELY missed by the author of the editorial.
Both Obama and Romney should realize that the continual focus on full employment means, “full toil and waste for all forever.” They need to address the question of how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (productive capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total products and services, and thus, how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?
The problem is that we simply do not have anyone presenting or discussing the central issue that I have been raising about how the system furthers concentrated ownership of productive capital economic growth, while leaving the vast majority of people essentially enslaved in labor tasks exponentially being destroyed or degraded by technological innovation and invention––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs.
Where is the media and academia who have remained silent on this pressing issue? Where are those leaders that can be supported for serving the public interest, and where is the money to mount presidential, senatorial, and congressional campaigns that won’t behold them to special interests? This is problematic!
Sadly, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics. It is the ONLY growth strategy that will work to keep America competitive with the rest of the world.
WAKE-UP AMERICA!!
We need to start with enacting and implementing the policies and programs identified in the Capital Homestead Act (http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm). We need new justice-committed leaders, especially those who want to end the corruption built into our exclusionary system of monopoly capitalism––the main source of corruption of any political system, democratic or otherwise. They will need to advocate the need to radically overhaul the Federal tax system and monetary policies and institute proposals to get money power to the 99 percent of American citizens who now only rely on their labor worker earnings––which are constantly being eroded. Under the Just Third Way more just and simple tax system, the following is proposed:
• Eliminate all tax loopholes and subsidies,
• Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs,
• Encourage corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full dividend payout shares for broad-based citizen ownership,
• Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but
• Pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.
• The tax rate would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above the personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt, but the poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes.
• As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
• The Federal Reserve would stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and
• Begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
• The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets,
• The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy.
• Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but
• Would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
It should be obvious to every American that the continual focus on full employment job creation means, “full toil and waste for all forever.”
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-will-never-be-enough-jobs-in-america-again
For continued reading please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary
