On February 1, 2013, Matthew O’Brien writes in The Atlantic:
How will our children, grandchildren, and sundry other friends and relatives too young to see an R-rated movie unaccompanied ever pay back the entire debt the government is piling up now? Easy. They won’t. …the government can just roll over its debts in perpetuity.
It’s not the debt that needs to be urgently addressed but SIGNIFICANTLY the reality that debt is used to feather the OWNERSHIP INTERESTS of an elite in America through subsidies, loans, grants, guaranteed loans, government contracts, and other forms of OWNERSHIP CLASS welfare, open and concealed.
In the meantime, while the wealthy ownership class further amasses the FUTURE ownership of productive capital assets, subsidized by debt, the majority of Americans who are non- or under-capitalized are not earning enough income to properly support themselves and their families. The country is experiencing a widening divide between an elite income class with well-paid salaries and dividend and capital gain income from stock ownership and low-pay wage earners and those dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare funded by extracting taxes and incurring national debt. This situation will continue to worsen. Americans need to WAKE UP and realize that the FUTURE is one of technological unemployment. 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. And as a result, most American incomes will decline, which will result in a downturn in the economy as there will be fewer and fewer “customers with money” to purchase the products and services society needs and wants. The result: no or significantly reduced opportunity for income.
This new reality is the result of technological innovation and invention, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, and an obsolete union movement stuck in job creation and “more pay for less work” instead of bargaining for employee ownership and increased incomes resulting from dividends earned as stock owners in corporate America. The wealthy ownership class, on the other hand is further their ownership hold on the country, enriching themselves through ownership stock dividends and capital gains.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
This can be accomplished by applying the logic of corporate finance, which uses self-financing asset-backed credit for productive uses to grow the economy. People invest in capital ownership on the basis that the investment will pay for itself. This is were the government can play a significant role in providing to EVERY American the financial mechanisms to facilitate loans specifically for productive capital investment without the requirement of “past” savings.
Productive capital investment and thus economic growth expansion occurs when there are “customers with money” to purchase the extended products and services created. Capital formation transactions are monetized as determined by the expertise of corporate management and banks––that each transaction is viably feasible so that there is virtually no risk. What is needed is to implement financing tools and economic proposals to correct the imbalance between production and consumption at its source, and broaden ownership of productive capital in conformance with private property free market principles. Thus, setting ourselves on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice requires that we finance FUTURE productive capital growth simultaneously with creating new capitalists owners who will derive dividend income to make them good “customers with money.”
The solution is not a focus on JOB CREATION but a focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION whereby EVERY American can acquire private, individual ownership in FUTURE income-producing productive capital investment without the need to limit the financing to past savings and/or requiring workers to reduce their consumption incomes to become owners.
We need aggressive economic growth while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital formation, enabling EVERY American to acquire via self-payment loans a viable income-producing capital estate over time.
Democrats and Republicans need to represent the well-being of ALL Americans with a priority on strengthening the economy and significantly generating income for ALL Americans.
The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve 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. As well national debt needs to be focused on growing the private sector of the economy simultaneously with facilitating private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital formation. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” Also needed is a restructuring of corporations to provide incentives for them to fully pay out their profit earnings in the form of dividend income to their owners and finance FUTURE growth by issuing and selling new stock available to EVERY American to purchase on credit. The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
The fundamental economic solution is to create income for EVERY American by simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital economic growth and fully paying the profit dividends to the new American owners of the income-producing capital assets of our corporations.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
