On September 1, 2012, Walter Hamilton writes an excellent article in the Los Angeles Times stating that the public sees the rich as greedier and less honest, but also smarter and hard-working.
In accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney represented more than the GOP’s best hope for recapturing the White House.
In many ways, he also embodied the country’s tangled opinions about wealth and the wealthy.
Amid a hapless economy and bulging income gap between the upper class and everyone else, the combative presidential race has focused attention on an underlying debate about wealth.
While there is no question that there is rising inequality between the wealth ownership class and the non-owning labor worker class, Walter Hamilton fails to really communicate what it means to be a CAPITAL OWNER and benefit from low capital-gains rates. The wealthy ownership class derives their income not so much from their “labor work,” but from dividend (profit) earnings, gains in asset values, interest and rents. This is the essence of OWNERSHIP and the bundle of property rights that accrue to the wealthy.
Average inflation-adjusted, after-tax incomes of the richest 1 percent of U.S. households ballooned 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, according to an October report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That was more than four times the 65 percent growth for the rest of the top 20 percent.
Almost two-thirds of Americans believe the income gap is widening, and 57 percent said that’s negative for society, according to the Pew Research Center poll. Nearly the same percentage, 58 percent, said the wealthy pay too little in taxes.
Conservatives would have you believe that low taxes result in economic growth investment, but fail to address the reality that our rigged financial system perpetuates CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of virtually ALL future investment in income-producing productive capital assets––the engine of economic growth.
The pundits say that the lower tax rates will stimulate investment and thus economic growth. My question is who will own the future productive capital of the United States and wouldn’t it be wise to ensure that the future ownership is broadly held by EVERY American? Wouldn’t it be wise to empower EVERY American to acquire future productive capital investment and pay for it out of the future earnings of the investments––just like the wealth have done and do today?
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. The result increasingly is that there is no longer the opportunity or the ability of people in the lower and middle classes to climb the economic ladder.
While the the ability to improve one’s lot in life, say, from lower income to middle income, through talent and hard work has always been the central notion of the American Dream, we are no longer a nation where the production of products and services is tilted toward labor worker opportunities. Instead, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are exponentially destroying jobs or degrading jobs in terms of wage and salary levels and benefits, and shifting production to human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.––the non-human component of wealth creation.
The troubling economic and social trends (global capitalism, free-trade doctrine, tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs) caused by continued concentrated ownership of productive capital will threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the contenders for the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need as a society to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.
Please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wealth-romney-20120901,0,2471957.story
