Los Angeles Times Columnist Michael Hiltzik writes:
“Our one shared national moment of fiscal soul-searching is behind us for another year — of course I refer to the filing of tax returns — but tax reform theater in Washington, like the melody in the old Irving Berlin song, lingers on.
So while individual and business taxpayers watch to see whether any tax reform plan has any chance of passage, the Obama administration’s “Buffett rule” proposal succumbed Monday to the threat of filibuster by Senate Republicans. A House GOP plan purportedly aimed at giving small business a tax cut will come up this week to face its own doom.”
Hiltzik hits the problem squarely, saying:
“It’s not about government finance, or economics, or industrial planning, or social policy. It’s about all those things, and how they interact with one another. The only way to keep all those factors straight is to focus on the goal one is trying to achieve — an economy in which the benefits of growth are fairly distributed, or one in which the same few people pocket all the gains?”
Unfortunately, Hiltzik, as nearly everyone who can influence the national dialogue, continues to think in terms of one-factor economics, ignoring the prominence of the other non-human factor of production (productive capital), which is exponentially displacing labor workers in the production of products and services.
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.
We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
The government should acknowledge its obligation to make productive capital ownership economically purchasable by capitalless Americans using capital credit, and, as Kelso states, “substantially assume financial responsibility for the economy through establishing and supervising the implementation of an economic, labor and business policy of democratized economic power.” Historically, capital has been the primary engine of industrialization. But as used, as binary economist Louis Kelso has argued, has, as well, “been the chief cause of the institutional deformities that have created and maintained two incompatible classes: the overcapitalized and the undercapitalized.”
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120417,0,1294418.column
