Is Paul Krugman's Liquidity Trap Really An Inequality Trap? (Demo)

By Gary Reber Uncategorized January 16, 2013

On January 16, 2013, Mary Manning Cleveland, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Economics at Columbia University writes in The Huffington Post:

In my view, we don’t have a “liquidity trap”; we have an “inequality trap”. What’s that? An “inequality trap” happens in a downturn, when the One Percent, big corporations and banks hoard cash, starving small businesses for capital. The greater the inequality and deeper the downturn, the tighter the trap.

The multinationals are indeed awash in cash. In an article appropriately titled, “Dead Money,” The Economist reports how major corporations trim real investment — such as new technology — while piling up cash. For example, firms in the S&P 500 held about $900 billion in cash at the end of June, up 40 percent from 2008. The Economist dismisses the conservative claim that “meddlesome federal regulations and America’s high corporate-tax rate is locking up cash and depressing investment.” Why? All big multinational firms have been hoarding cash, not just U.S.-based ones; it’s been a growing trend since the 1970s.

The big banks are also awash in cash. For example, JP Morgan’s September 2012 balance sheet shows that out of $2,321 billion in assets, JP Morgan holds $887 billion in “Cash and Short-Term Investments” — over a third! (The “short-term investments” are gambles in the international money markets, but that’s a different story.)

To the One Percent, the cash bath may look like Krugman’s liquidity trap: a lack of investments yielding the high returns they enjoyed before the 2008 crash. But try telling small businesses there’s not enough demand and too much cash! They face drastic “credit rationing” by the banks. The banks are of course super-cautious these days, which is why they pile up cash. But in addition, the collapse in home values has reduced small business owners’ collateral for loans. And following the failure of many small banks and the consolidation of giant banks into megabanks, far fewer banks can or will lend to small businesses.

The issue that is not addressed by Paul Krugman nor Mary Manning Cleveland is why is there income inequality. The reality is rooted in the timeless, exponential expansion of job-displacing technology caused by tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. Such technological unemployment is ignored with the notion that somehow those replaced by productive capital means will find work provide by the new technologies. This, however, is a fallacy, as the extent of technological innovation and invention has become so advanced that 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.

While this paradigm shift continues economists such as Krugman and Cleveland and our leaders continue to focus on JOB CREATION rather than OWNERSHIP CREATION of the productive capital assets that are constantly being created and applied to produce the products and services that society needs and wants. They ONLY see income distribution through job creation. Yet full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to maximize profit for the owners of the companies whose assets are increasingly physical productive capital. 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 productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth should it not become the source of added property ownership incomes for all? Logic dictates 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. This is because they view the economic world through the lens of one-factor labor thinking.

The focus should be to create an economic democracy in which the ownership of capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. As a result, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will in turn promote economic growth.

Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment––thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income. Long ago that was once true because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input. Full employment as the means to distribute income is not achievable. When capital workers (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another.

We have become a society in which the capitalism practiced today is what, for a long time, I have termed “Hoggism,” propelled by greed and the sheer love of power over others. “Hoggism” institutionalizes greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges). “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 worker more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people 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.

The master plan to put us back on a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice is ready to be adopted and implemented. It is the Capital Homestead Act. Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-manning-cleveland/paul-krugman-inequality_b_2483684.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Is Paul Krugman's Liquidity Trap Really An Inequality Trap? (Demo)

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