On February 7, 2013, Arthur Delaney writes in the Huffington Post:
More Americans believe today than they did two years ago that their country will never fully recover from the Great Recession.
Fifty-six percent of Americans surveyed by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in August 2010 said they believed the Great Recession would permanently change the economy. In a January follow-up survey, 60 percent of respondents agreed with that sentiment.
“Five years of economic misery have profoundly diminished Americans’ confidence in the economy and their outlook for the next generation,” Rutgers professor and survey co-author Carl Van Horn said in a statement.
Most survey respondents — 73 percent — had either lost their jobs or knew somebody who had. More than half said they have less money than they did before the recession, and 61 percent believe they will never fully recover.
Less than a third of workers think the economy will be better next year, and the same percentage thinks the economy will be worse. The rest think it will be the same. That finding isn’t far off from the expectations of economists: The Congressional Budget Office said in a statement on Tuesday that unemployment will likely remain above 7.5 percent through next year. It’s 7.9 percent right now.
Of workers who’ve found new jobs after being unemployed, 54 percent said they were making less money — a finding that echoes data from the government’s annual survey of displaced workers.
Less than a third of employed survey respondents said they blamed the unemployed for not having jobs. The survey’s authors suggested that’s probably because a vast majority of respondents had either experienced unemployment themselves or knew someone who had.
The January survey coincided with a big drop in consumer confidence that many economists attributed to the expiration of a payroll tax cut that shrank workers’ take-home pay by 2 percent.
This is the result of our nation’s fixation on JOB CREATION rather than prioritizing OWNERSHIP CREATION, which effectively would result in a scenario of “full employment” for a significant time period, providing the opportunity for good wages and salaries, as well as a second income from stock ownership dividends. But, unfortunately, the American people see their economic world SOLELY through one-factor thinking focused on jobs, rather than understanding the necessity for EVERY American to become an owner of the FUTURE productive capital assets of a growth economy.
Other economies and countries are excelling at economic growth as is evidenced in Asia, particularly China. They have invested in new cities and urban metropolises, and in manufacturing the products needed and wanted by ALL people throughout the world. America, on the other hand, has retreated and essentially abandoned the pursuit of economic growth to renew and build new cities and urban metropolises with stunning infrastructure support, and to re-engage in manufacturing within the United States to produce products needed and wanted by our population and other people throughout the world. As a result, the reality is that America is in self-inflicted decline.
This depressing scenario does not have to play out. We can transform America, but the people must WAKE UP and read and think in order to realize that the FUTURE is about the growth of technology and as a result tectonic shifts in the technologies of producing the products and services needed and wanted by society. Success in the future will depend on winning combinations of teams of people and “machines” working essentially to destroy employment by making physical capital more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people will be the measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. This is non-stopable and has been the engine of progress over the past century evidenced by an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. What distinguishes today’s shifts is that the JOB CREATION in the private sector in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role at a pace never experienced before. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Because of this more jobs are being destroyed and devalued, not only in manufacturing but in services industries as well, than can be created without significant economic growth.
Our banking and credit systems, however do not properly serve the economic interests of the vast majority of Americans who remain job serfs or welfare dependent. Instead the system is rigged to benefit the ALREADY wealthy ownership class. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of the work of such teams people and “machines,” as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being. It is also the reason why our country is in decline.
Binary economist Louis Kelso postulated: “When consumer earning power is systematically acquired in the course of the normal operations of the economy by people who need and want more consumer goods and services, the production of goods and services should rise to unprecedented levels; the quality and craftsmanship of goods and services, freed of the cornercutting imposed by the chronic shortage of consumer purchasing power, should return to their former high levels; competition should be brisk; and the purchasing power of money should remain stable year after year.”
Bucky Fuller, an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist stated:
“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. [Our challenge is to] make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation and without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
The solution that is needed is a balanced Just Third Way approach to building a FUTURE economy that supports affluence for EVERY American. This requires investment in FUTURE income-producing productive capital assets while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of the resulting expansion of existing corporations and future corporations. Not only is employee ownership the norm to be sought wherever there are workers but beyond employee ownership the norm should be to create an OWNERSHIP CULTURE whereby EVERY American can benefit financially by owning a SUPER IRA-TYPE Capital Homestead Account portfolio of income-producing, full-voting, full-dividend payout securities in America’s expanding corporations and those newly created to produce the future products and services needed and wanted by society.
Political and private sector leadership is required to transform the American economic system, especially our terribly flawed money and credit systems, to enable every citizen to become an empowered citizen-owner as a fundamental human right. The social technologies for turning formerly propertyless citizens into participatory and empowered capital owners on capital credit repayable with future savings have been successfully proven.
Policies are needed to ensure that where taxpayer monies (whether obtained from tax extraction or debt, as in national debt and deficits) are expended to “stimulate” the private sector (through government subsidies, loan guarantees, grants, and contracts with corporations building infrastructure and economic development, including the military-industrial complex), that stipulations are attached that the financial benefit results in broadened private, individual ownership of the particular companies and that the full earnings of the investments are paid out to their owners.
In order to ensure that the economy operates most efficiently, productive capital must be broadly owned. This is because as technology advances, people cannot produce enough by labor alone to permit them to purchase everything that others produce with their productive capital assets. Logically, if productive capital is doing most of the work of production (the physical aspect of producing products and services), and private property includes the right to receive the income generated by what is owned, as labor becomes less productive (essentially less necessary when replaced or devalued by human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, biobotics, digital computerized operations, etc.) relative to productive capital, people who formerly relied on labor must shift to owning productive capital to carry out the work of production.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
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.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
