On November 7, 2012, Yuval Rosenberg writes in The Fiscal Times:
The U.S. has enjoyed a decades-long stretch of economic prosperity. The Great Recession was the most severe break in that stretch. While the economy has been growing since the second half of 2009, that growth has been bumpy – and modest at best.
America has tried the Republican “cut spending, cut taxes, and cut ‘entitlements’” and the Democrat “protect ‘entitlements,’ provide tax-payer supported stimulus, lower middle and working class taxes, tax the rich and redistribute” brands of economic policy, as well as a mixture of both. Republican ideology aims to revive hard-nosed laissez-faire appeals to hard-core conservatives but ignores the relevancy of healing the economy and halting the steady disintegration of the middle class and working poor.
Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration wrote today:
[President Obama’s] victory and the pending ‘fiscal cliff’ give him an opportunity to recast the economic debate. Our central challenge, he should say, is not to reduce the budget deficit. It’s to create more good jobs, grow the economy, and widen the circle of prosperity.”The deficit is a problem only in proportion to the overall size of the economy. If the economy grows faster than its current 2 percent annualized rate, the deficit shrinks in proportion. Tax receipts grow, and the deficit becomes more manageable.
But if economic growth slows – as it will, if taxes are raised on the middle class and if government spending is reduced when unemployment is still high – the deficit becomes larger in proportion. That’s the austerity trap Europe finds itself in. We don’t want to go there.
“Create more good jobs” is understandable; “grow the economy” is understandable, but “widen the circle of prosperity” is vague.
I believe the solution to how to move forward is to first acknowledge that due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production there is a paradigm shift exponentially occurring in the way products and services are produced, with far, far less reliance on labor worker input, and far, far, greater reliance on the non-human means to create efficiency, lower costs, and produce more and better quality products and services with less labor.
While the Los Angeles Times editorial board offers no solution, Reich’s solution is the Democratic Party’s approach, which is to tax the ownership class and redistribute income as well as to borrow more monies, all of which is pledged to stimulate JOB CREATION through government taxpayer spending in the private and public sectors. A better solution would be to support this approach but to stipulate that the end result of the spending first assures that private, individual ownership of the assets underlying the new economic growth is broadened, followed by REAL job creation.
We need, as a nation, to embrace and educate our people to understand and fully participate in the building of an OWNERSHIP CULTURE as the foundation for “widening the circle of prosperity” and thereby increasing the taxable base and monies to the treasury to eliminate deficits and pay off our national debt.
We can no longer tolerate the further OWNERSHIP CONCENTRATION of business corporations who structurally own the productive assets of our future growth. We must implement financial mechanisms that will enable ordinary Americans, and EVERY child, woman and man to acquire ownership of NEW, productive capital assets (without taking anything aways from those who own current assets) and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings of their investments. Thus, we will begin to put the emphasis on economic growth propelled by science, engineering, innovation, and invention that results in new non-human productive means to produce products and services while simultaneously empowering EVERY American to participate as a share owner in the new wealth that will be created and be entitled to the income streams generated by the investments in our future.
Support the Capital Homestead Act athttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm andhttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
Sign the Petition athttp://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
