Bernie "Backwards" Sanders (Demo)

By Gary Reber Uncategorized December 4, 2014

On December 4, Michael D. Greaney, Center for Economic and Social Justice, writes:

Is it better to take from the rich to give to the poor, or to help the poor become productive through capital ownership as well as employment of labor?

Bernie “Backwards” Sanders

Bernie Sanders has announced that he has a twelve-point economic plan to break the power of the Koch brothers and other financial oligarchs, and restore prosperity to America. Nice try, Hon. B. Sanders, but from a Just Third Way perspective and the logic of Say’s Law of Markets, you’re going about it the wrong way, even backwards.

Frankly, given pure credit (i.e., credit based on financial feasibility and extended without regard to existing accumulations of wealth) and capital credit insurance and reinsurance to replace traditional forms of collateral, the rich become superfluous for all practical purposes. Once you realize that ordinary people can become capital owners without using somebody else’s past savings, and generate their own consumption income by becoming productive through capital ownership in addition to or instead of labor, a whole new world opens up.

It’s not how much the Kochs or anybody else have. It’s how much everybody else has the opportunity and means to produce and acquire. If I have enough, it shouldn’t matter to me how much more you have.

Redistributing existing wealth as a solution instead of as an expedient on the way to a solution is a mug’s game. Want to upset the rich and powerful . . . and those who think they want to be rich and powerful? Let them know that you want to take it all away. You don’t think they’ll resist?

If “Backwards Bernie” wants to benefit humanity (and his constituency), he should advocate a program of expanded ownership for the many, not divestiture of ownership for the few. The rich and powerful might even go along with something like that. After all, the conservative schtick is that ownership and wealth are Good Things.

We’re not even asking them to put their money where their mouths are. We’re asking them to help us put our money where their mouths are. They risk nothing, and get to keep what they have. We risk almost nothing (capital credit insurance and reinsurance, remember?), and gain something for ourselves that costs the rich nothing.

Fortunately, we happen to have a program ready. All it takes is a few (hundred thousand) people to tell the Hon. Sanders (or some other mover and shaker) that it’s available, and can be implemented with only a relatively few changes in current law.

It’s called “Capital Homesteading.” If you haven’t heard of it, maybe it’s time you did. If you have heard of it, maybe it’s time to let others — like Bernie Sanders — in on the secret.

http://just3rdway.blogspot.com/2014/12/bernie-backwards-sanders.html

Here what I recommend Senator Bernie Sanders incorporate into his 12-point economic plan:

• Invest in our crumbling infrastructure with a major program to create business employee ownership opportunities and jobs as a stipulation for taxpayer monies allocate to contracts for rebuilding roads, bridges, water systems, waste water plants, airports, railroads and schools.

• Show how the proposed Capital Homestead Act would develop new system reforms to support production and workers in the United States instead of giving tax breaks to corporations which ship investment and jobs to low-wage countries abroad.

• Stand for policies that make it easier for workers to join ownership unions and bargain for ownership sharing, fair wages and benefits.

• Stand for raising the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour but make it clear that this is not the solution but a temporary expedient as workers gain over time substantial dividend-payment income from their shock ownership in the companies that employ them.

• Stand for providing equal pay for women workers who now make 78 percent of what male counterparts make.

• Reform trade policies that have shuttered morn than 60,000 factories and cost more than 4.9 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs through tax policy reform and tariffs where necessary.

• Make a college education virtually free.

• Make affordable child care a reality.

• Restore and strengthen policies that would break up big banks and create insured, interest-free capital loan financing so that EVERY citizen has the equal opportunity to acquire stock ownership in the companies that are growing the economy without requiring them to pledge past savings or asset equities, or to reduce their present income. The six largest banks now have assets equivalent to 71 percent of our gross domestic product, over $9.8 trillion. They underwrite more than half of mortgages and issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards.

• Support a universal health care system as an extension of Medicare-for-all that provides better care at less cost. In no what should this preclude private providers of health care services.

• Expand Social Security by lifting the contributions caps. This is a temporary expedient as citizens gain over time substantial dividend-paying stock ownership in America’s corporations.

• Reform the tax code by: (1) eliminating all tax loopholes and subsidies; (2) providing an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs; (3) encouraging corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full-dividend payout shares for broad-based citizen ownership; (4) eliminating the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but pay our of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs; (5) creating a tax rate that would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above the personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt. The poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as would the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes; (6) substituting inheritance and gift taxes with a transfer tax imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all member of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes.

Bernie "Backwards" Sanders (Demo)

Bernie “Backwards” Sanders

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