Posted by mybudget360 on April 6, 2013:
The employment report was very weak no matter how you sliced it. The unemployment rate fell but this was largely driven by an incredibly large number of people dropping out of the labor force. This recession has been extremely tough on US households. The recession was technically over in the summer of 2009 which seems like an eternity ago. However, the recession was over for a small group of Americans. Labor force participation is now down to where it was in 1979! The report was abysmal no matter how you diced it and this is coming on years of the Fed shoveling trillions of dollars to their friendly neighbor banks. This was supposedly the recipe for recovery but a recovery for which group? Certainly not the typical American family. We have all these measures of distress hitting high levels: people on disability, about 15 percent of our population on food stamps, and labor force participation down to 63.3 percent. This is what happens when 663,000 people drop out of the labor force. Where did the workers go?
Without the growth of an economy, job opportunities will decline. The absent discussion on a national level and in such publications as The Washington Post and other progressive and conservative news analysis sources, is WHO OWNS AMERICA and WHO SHOLID OWN AMERICA? We need to address the reality that jobs are being destroyed and devalued in terms of wage and salary levels as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production intensify and permeate every sector of the economy. We need to address the reality that businesses, faced with fewer and fewer “customers with money” have to find ways to reduce their production and operational costs, which translates to employing less and less people, substituting “machines” for people, and overall devaluing the level of earnings paid out to workers (attacks on unions, for example) in order to compete in a global economy where “slave” wages are de facto along with the rapid expansion of technology.
What we should be focused on is creating a future system of economic democracy based on equality of opportunity for every person to become an owner of productive capital––the non-human means of production embodied in land, structures, human-intelligent machines, super-automatoin, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.––that is the driver of productivity gains.
The reality, which is ignored in our political discussions and by conventional economists and the media, is that productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. The ownership of productive capital is the source of wealth and income for the richest Americans––not a job.
Businesses, whether small or large, or sole proprietors, partnerships, or business corporations are formed to provide products and services at a profit. Their success or failure is dependent on whether or not there are “customers with money.”
The solution to creating economic growth, with the aim of building a future economy that can support affluence for EVERY American, is to focus on expanding the economy while simultaneously and concurrently creating new capitalist owners of the FUTURE productive capital means of production. Thus, as wealth is created so also will “customers with money” be created as a result of the dividend income earned from their capital ownership holdings. This, in turn, will create demand for jobs as the nation will need people to contribute their labor and build this future affluent economy that constantly utilizes technologies to reduce the need for toil labor and affords more leisure time for its citizens.
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.
What we really need is a national discussion and education on the topic of the importance of productive capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private productive capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new productive capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable income-producing capital estate.
If we are to significantly expand the population of “customers with money” and significantly grow the economy, then the ownership of productive capital must be spread more broadly and simultaneously with the growth, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent of the people who now own 50 to 90 percent of the wealth controlled by businesses. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a growth economy.
See my article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
