The path to implementing a tax on financial transactions (known as the FTT) was never going to be smooth. This week’s announcement that the expected coalition between Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in Germany will prioritise the tax’s implementation, is a sign that the proposal remains on track. But any measure that taxes or regulates financial markets and banks will always meet concerted opposition.
The net result is that an FTT would slow short-term trades, which are mainly unproductive, helping to reduce the risk of crises that are so detrimental to growth. Furthermore, the potential €30 billion in revenue the European FTT could raise, could be invested productively, for example in infrastructure and innovation, encouraging much needed future growth and employment and making European countries more competitive.
If such a tax is imposed the revenue should be used to finance new productive capital formation simultaneously with the creation of new individual citizen owners. The revenue would be provided in the form of capital credit loans to purchase newly issued stock in corporations wanting to grow the economy with the loans paid off from the future earnings (savings) of the investments.
The solution is to create a balance between production and consumption.
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 have a dysfunctional “system” with barriers for ordinary Americans to acquire income-producing FUTURE productive capital assets and pay for their acquisition out of FUTURE earnings, not dependent on PAST savings. This is a problem that was solved by binary economist Louis Kelso over 50 years ago. Having experience the absurdities of the Great Depression with essential food products “dumped” because the owners of the companies producing the products could not sell their products, he conceived of an alternative organization of the economy that would free economic growth from the slavery of past savings. His solution was to enable EVERY child, woman and man to rightfully earn income from their private property-protected individual ownership in FUTURE new productive capital assets.
Advocates for putting America and the rest of the world on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice should be hammering their leadership, academia and the national media to address the CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP issue and WHO SHOULD OWN AMERICA and HOW! The focus on JOB CREATION will not result in REAL job growth until there is REAL and SUSTAINED national economic growth with EVERY American becoming a new capitalist in the FUTURE productive capital economic engine of growth and the income-producing assets of our business corporations that constantly seek to lower costs by shifting the making of products and services from labor to the non-human factor––productive capital, e.g. land and resources, structures, human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.
The choices are clear:
“Monopolistic capitalism is faced with three alternatives: (1) It will either be taxed out of existence by the government, with the government increasing the dependence of its citizens through bureaucratic handouts; or (2) it will involuntarily be dispossessed through class struggle; or (3) it will voluntarily share control and responsibility with labor, with a consequent rebirth of the pleasure and pride of creative work in the restoration of liberty. Property will thus become the art of democracy, or the God-given right of every human being to shape something according to his own image, as the potter shapes his clay, the gardener his garden, and now we may add — as the laborer shapes his capital.” ~ Fulton J. Sheen, Freedom Under God, (1940/2013) page 73.
