On March 2, 2013, Jim Tankersley writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
Consider the dominant story that economic forecasters have been telling you for years now: The U.S. economy just can’t catch a break. It has been poised time and again to rocket back to a growth rate that would recapture all the ground lost in the Great Recession, while delivering big job gains. But every time, some outside event scuttles things. The euro crisis flares up. A Japanese tsunami scrambles global supply chains. Lawmakers play chicken with the federal debt limit.
Most recently, “fiscal cliff” tax hikes and sequestration budget cuts are playing the culprit. And the bad-luck economy, like a fireball pitching prospect dogged by freak arm injuries, never reaches its full potential.
Now consider the possibility that the can’t-catch-a-break story gets it backward. What if the economy isn’t particularly unlucky? What if it’s basically doing what we should expect it to? What if something has changed, thanks to fallout from the recession, or a string of bad policy choices, or both, and growth has shifted into a lower gear? What if this slow and fragile expansion is as good as we’re likely to get for a while?
This is an alternative story that economists across the ideological spectrum have begun to explore. If it’s correct, the implications for economic policy are big.
The United States economy is limping along with puny GDP growth at the rate of 2.2 percent last year, 1.8 percent the year before, and 2.4 percent in 2010, with at least 12 million Americans still looking for work. As a result of this sluggish growth, longtime unemployed workers have lost skills, making it harder for them to find work when it does open up. Executives have lost confidence in the economy’s ability to expand and willingness to invest in it because of the subsequent lack of “customers with money” to purchase their products and services. Without system reform, the future will continue to lower expectations for growth and this subpar growth will continue to render millions more of workers effectively unemployable. Designing and targeting skills-training programs is a partial solution that will benefit a relative few seeking jobs in the private sector. Without significant economic growth, there is no way that even with a every citizen educated to the university level will there be sufficient private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work. This is because in reality, job creation is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role as the primary means to produce products and services. New technological innovation and invention are changing the realities of the workplace and how we think about work. Without robust investment in economic growth America’s economic decline will continue.
Why is this happening?
The reason is simple. A relative few people OWN the preponderance of the nation’s productive capital wealth and are positioned to OWN the FUTURE productive wealth, from which they earn dividend income and valuable capital gains asset growth. This is why there is widening economic inequality resulting in class conflict between the so-called 1 percent “successful” ownership class and the 99 percent, who are capital-less or under-capitalized, and whose ONLY source of income is a job or taxpayer supported government welfare derived from tax extraction and national debt. This Income inequality is exponentially crippling the United States from realizing its creative and social and just economic potential.
Thus, there is the imbalance between production and consumption. A few wealthy people are thereby able to rig the “system” to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people or lowering operational costs is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, 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 or devaluing labor wages and salaries. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption, which is the problem with the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
For the nation to overcome widening income inequality, the obvious, logical solution is for people to OWN THE “MACHINES” and non-human means of production that result from technology. Broadening productive capital ownership should be the priority course of action for the FUTURE.
The balanced Just Third Way approach to building a FUTURE economy that supports affluence for EVERY American is presently not in the national discussion. It appears that the President of the United States, the elected Congressional representatives and Senators, academia, and the media are oblivious to this principled solution that has the ingredients to power economic growth at double-digit GNP rates.
This goal requires investment in FUTURE income-producing productive capital assets while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of the resulting expansion of existing large 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 (CHA) 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.
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement 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
