On May 3, 2012, Los Angeles Times reporters Andrew Tangel and Meg James quote former President Clinton saying at the Milken Institute’s 2012 Global Conference:
“Focus on stimulus, not cost cutting.”
The former president said:
“The continent cannot rely on austerity measures to bail itself out of the debt crisis. Instead, it needs to focus on multiyear plans to boost its nations’ economies.”
“You’ve got to do it with growth. You cannot reduce the public debt without proper budget restraint, proper revenue stream and adequate growth.”
I agree with President Clinton that to solve our taxation and debt burdens economic growth is the answer.
However, what never gets addressed is how stimulus monies are allocated effect who benefits. Stimulus monies thus far have always enriched the private ownership holdings of productive capital assets of the contracted corporate entity. Thus, taxpayer monies are “invested” in the building of infrastructure or research or the military-industrial complex, but there is never the requirement for those business corporations to broaden the private, individual ownership of the new assets resulting from the public investment among their employees and other American citizens. Thus, the current stimulus policies result in furthering the concentration of productive capital ownership, which benefit the present “ownership class,” not the working class or the middle class or for that matter the poor.
What then is the cause of slow growth and unemployment. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. 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. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. 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.
The solution is investment in both the private and public sectors with the requirement that productive capital ownership be broadened, so that ALL Americans, can over time build a viable capital estate and earn income through their capital worker contribution, as the rich minority does now and has always done.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-clinton-milken-20120503,0,6832992.story
