On November 12, 2013, David Cay Johnston writes on The National Memo:
A new poll finds clear, overwhelming public support for specific tax increases on big corporations and the rich.
In a stunning change of public attitudes, Republicans have lost majority support for their signature, if not only, economic policy issue: tax cuts.
The results from a host of polls this year indicate that Democrats can win big in future elections if they focus on progressive tax-and-spend policies that create jobs, protect Social Security and Medicare and require rich Americans and big corporations to shoulder more of the burden of supporting government.
Asked what budget priorities they want Congress to focus on, 68 percent of voters chose strengthening the economy and creating jobs while just 28 percent want deficit reduction and lowering the national debt (the Tea Party platform).
Those figures come from a Hart Research Associates telephone poll of 1,009 registered voters conducted in late October for Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 325 progressive, labor and similar organizations.
While the poll was conducted for progressives, it is consistent with other polls sampling public attitudes about the economy, taxes and federal spending.
Indeed, the latest poll shows that even a quarter of Tea Party Republicans favor some progressive tax and spend policies.
It also shows that almost 4 in 5 registered voters want to close corporate loopholes — which both parties say they support, but which Republicans have repeatedly blocked, arguing that this would amount to backdoor tax hikes. Some Democrats have also worked to protect corporate tax favors.
A convincing 7 in 10 voters favor maintaining current tax rates on profits earned offshore and imposing a 30 percent or higher tax on annual incomes above $1 million, a policy known as the Buffett Rule. Both of these policies are favored by progressive Democrats and opposed by leading Republicans.
Looked at from the opposite perspective, the poll results show that only small minorities of voters support multinational companies that want to bring home hundreds of billions of dollars parked offshore while paying little or no tax.
This also means that few Americans believe the wealthiest Americans pay too much income tax.
This finding is crucial because it means an implicit rejection of the argument Republicans have made for more than three decades: that job creation depends on reduced taxes on the rich. The theory is not supported by decades of empirical data that I analyzed for my trilogy on the American economy: Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch and The Fine Print.
There is no question that corporate tax rates need to be raised significantly with the carrot extended to corporations to exempt them from the corporate tax if they 1) pay out fully the earnings of the company to the stock owners (which would then be taxed at the personal level) and 2) finance all future growth using financial mechanisms that will create new stock owners––namely employees and non-employees. Such mechanisms include Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) trusts and Capital Homesteading Accounts (CHA), both utilizing future earnings as the means to pay off the capital credit loans issued by banks for investment by corporations desiring to expand.
While CAPITAL OWNERSHIP is not in the consciousness of the American people, largely due to their lack of education on the subject and exclusion from the primary source of income and wealth accumulation that benefit the rich, we must forge leadership that will focus on OWNERSHIP CREATION of the capital assets of corporations by which over time EVERY American can accumulate a viable, diversified portfolio of wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets in the form of stock ownership in corporations that pay out fully their earnings and extend full voting rights to every stockholder.
As constructed, the poll focused on jobs rather than being inclusive to include stock ownership as well. Yet a focus on jobs is not the solution as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production of the products and services needed and wanted by society is exponentially destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor as corporate America replaces human labor with non-human instruments of production.
While this is the reality, by embracing “full production” rather than “full employment,” in the relative short term “full employment” will occur because every person willing and able to work will be needed to build a future economy that will support general affluence for EVERY citizen. At the same time corporations will benefit from the populous support to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to maximize profits for the owners––which will consist of both the current ownership class and a new, ever expanding ownership class that ultimately comprises EVERY citizen. With such structural reform America will be able to compete more effectively on a global basis as American corporations will be able to operate far more efficiently with less costly overhead. Such structural reform will put us on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice without taking from those who already own and destroying the principles of private property, and without having to rely on redistribution of wealth and income to support the masses needing taxpayer-supported government welfare sourced from tax extraction and national debt .
Other necessary structural reforms in addition to 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, would include:
• Eliminate all tax loopholes and subsidies,
• Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs,
• Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but
• Pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, 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.
• The tax rate 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, but 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.
• As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.
• The Federal Reserve would 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 stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
• The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in corporations needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets,
• The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy.
• Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but
• Would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
This is the Just Third Way (http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797) advocated by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (www.cesj.org) and the essence of the proposed Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm. See the full Act at http://cesj.org/homestead/strategies/national/cha-full.pdf
http://www.nationalmemo.com/big-majorities-favor-progressive-tax-and-spend-policies-polls-show/
