Dateline February 15, 2012 Los Angeles Times: “Obama’s budget plan calls for replacing the alternative minimum tax with the ‘Buffet rule,” helping the upper middle class.”
The proposal does not prevent wealthy people from circumventing federal taxes through the use of loopholes and deductions. For example, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, paid an effective rate of less than 14 percent… in 2010––far below the top ordinary income tax rate of 35 percent. That is because his income came from capital gains from ownership of productive capital. The word “ownership” is sadly missing from a national discussion of why the wealthy are wealthy.
What we really need in this 2012 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.
The resulting impact of our current approaches has been plutocratic government and concentration of capital ownership, which denies every citizen his or her pursuit of happiness (property). Market-sourced income (through concentrated capital ownership) has concentrated in individuals and families who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer products and services. They already have most of what they want and need so they invest their excess in new productive power, making them richer and richer through greater capital ownership. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck that makes the private property, market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital ownership concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people who depend entirely on wages from their labor or welfare and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. The production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result.
Today’s techniques of finance are designed to make the rich richer. None are designed to make the poor richer. That’s why the poor are poor. The reason they are poor is because they do not have viable capital ownership. Thus, we need to focus on revising today’s techniques of finance to broaden capital ownership.
While Americans believe in political democracy, political democracy will not work without a property-based market system of economic democracy. The system is the problem, but it can and must be overhauled.
Own Or Be Owned!
