Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, left, said the $600-million cut facing the FAA’s 2013 budget would force the agency to furlough the “vast majority” of its 47,000 employees for at least one day every two-week pay period, reducing staffing at airports and forcing the closure of 100 small air traffic control towers starting around April 1. (Win McNamee, Getty Images / February 25, 2013)
On February 25, 2013, Jim Puzzanghera writes in the Los Angeles Times:
When it comes to the nation’s debt, payback time might be here.
Years of low tax rates and rising federal spending, amplified by the devastating economic effect of the Great Recession, have driven the U.S. borrowing tab to more than $16 trillion from less than $1 trillion in 1981.
Deficit reduction has become the dominant issue in Washington. The first major tax increase since 1993 took place last month. And large automatic spending cuts — $1.2 trillion over the next decade — are set to kick in Friday.
The result: Average Americans are starting to feel the pain.
“The day of reckoning is here,” said David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general who has been warning about the nation’s long-term fiscal problems for several years.
“We’re at the end of an era where we have Democratic spending policies and Republican tax policies,” he said. “The result has been huge deficits and mounting debt burdens. It doesn’t work.”
The reality is that the national debt has exploded on a parallel path with the destruction and devaluation of jobs resulting from tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and global outsourcing of “slave labor.” Every private sector has participated in the de-industrialization and consequential negative growth of the American economy as the private sector, which manufactures the basic products and even services, has either employed human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, and digital computer operations or invested in enterprises in other countries with an abundance of “slave labor-waged” workers and not subject to safety and environmental regulations. When one, two, three or more competitive companies within a business sector embrace this approach then ALL have to follow or they will not be able to effectively compete.
What gets lost on most Americans, who still have a decent paying job but who are not paying attention to the forces unfolding around them, is that full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies constantly strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to be competitive, with lower priced products and services, and maximize profits to their owners, while maintaining or advancing quality. Therefore 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, as well as, in the relative short term, advantageous overseas operations with “sweat-shop” slave labor rates relative to American standards, low or no taxation, supportive infrastructure provisions, currency manipulation, and few if any environmental regulations––which translate to lower-cost production. And just because one is “educated” will not guarantee a good job with decent, family-supportative pay, because exponentially far fewer people, regardless of education, will be needed as “machines” replace people engaged in work, whether toil or creatively engaging.
The result has been the steady, slow death of REAL job opportunities that pay decent, livable, family-supportable wages and salaries. Rather than acknowledge what the REAL problem is, our political leadership, academia, and the media has ONLY couched every “solution” with the carrot “JOB CREATION.” They, as a group, are oblivious to the reality that the American financial system has been rigged to benefit a relative tiny minority of people, who generally are referred to as the 1 percent, by practicing a financial mechanism framework that facilitates their CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of the productive capital wealth and income of the nation NOW and in the FUTURE!
As a result, taxpayer supported monies in the form of tax extraction measures and pledges to repay national debt have been increasingly relied upon to support and prop-up an otherwise disastrous economy with all sorts of “welfare,” open and concealed aimed at the American underclass and the wealthy ownership class.
As for the concentrated ownership issue, this is the result of “Hoggism,” the term I have given to a cancer affecting capitalism. The word “capital” refers to a right of private citizens to OWN non-human productive capital or tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. The “ism” refers to the distinctive practice, system, or philosophy that the United States was founded on: “Capitalism” was meant to be a value system based on the importance and dignity of every human person. The “pursuit of happiness” phrase in the Declaration of Independence was interchangeable in those times with the word “property.” The original phrasing was “the right to life, liberty and property.” “The pursuit of happiness” phrase was a substitute for the “property” phrase. In the forerunner of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that securing “Life, Liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing Property” is the highest purpose for which any just government is formed. Democratizing economic power will return us to the pristine innocence and economic power diffusion we had in a pre-industrial society where labor was the principal factor in the creation of wealth.
Unfortunately, our leadership has allowed the “hoggist” cancer to permeate every quarter of our private business sector. “Hoggism” is about the ability of greedy rich people 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 employing “slave labor” 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. 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.
How did this happen? It happened because the America people lost sight of the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate. The America Dream was based on a value system that upheld the importance and dignity of every human person.
What is transforming before our eyes is the age of human-intelligent robotic machines and digital computerized super-automated production of products and services. The impact was significantly notable a decade ago and will continue for future decades and result in drastic nonlinear changes, upheaval, transformation, and mass unemployment. Its impact will be to significantly expand U.S. debt or allow a majority of Americans to feel the pain of not being able to escape poverty or near-poverty with more than half of Americans by 2020, who are able and willing to work. restricted to minimum wage earnings.
There’s nothing new about machines replacing people, but the rate of replacement is exponential and the result is that productivity gains lead to more wealth for the OWNERS of the non-human factor of production, but for others who have always been dependent on jobs as their source of income, there has been a steady decline to poverty-level labor incomes. This is the reason that FUTURE retirees will be in trouble financially.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Technological unemployment is rampant in its displacement of workers at an exponential rate. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital. 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. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
Yet, while the problem is one that no one can no longer ignore, the solution also is one starring them in the face, but they just can’t see the simplicity of it.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of owning FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through stock ownership dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the economy, and overtime build a viable capital estate that earns them dividend incomes to draw upon for retirement.
Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, 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. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
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. Such growth will also create demand for REAL jobs necessary for building the FUTURE affluent society. As our people become more affluent they will have income levels out of which to pay increased taxes to pay off our national debt and to support and sustain the necessary and desired functions of government. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economists and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden ownership in the new capital formation of the future simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate ownership shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital ownership in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value.
The solution will require the reform of the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. 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 preferred stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. 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” using pure capital credit. The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
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
Sign the WhiteHouse.gov petition at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-federal-reserve/PhY3Jswk
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-debt-pain-20130225,0,3733055.story
