Tax Policy And The Dewey Decimal System (Demo)

How can I afford to buy a house?
Can I afford to have a family?
How can I afford to feed, clothe, and house my family?
How can I survive the loss of a job without putting my family at risk?
Can I assure my children go to college?

My point here is to portray life as a continuum from helping ourselves to helping others. And finally now with that in mind I can make some of the points I wanted to make.

First, it should be obvious that the first and most important thing each of us can do to help society is to eliminate society’s need to help us. If we are not self-sufficient, we cannot help others.

I mention this because I’ve sneakily omitted taxation from the above lists of questions. This is because I want to make a point about where taxation is appropriate. It seems obvious to me that presently we tax people before they are able to help themselves. And I just don’t see the point of that.

Unfortunately, Kent Pitman has postulated his argument on employment, as in a job, as the sole source of income, completely ignoring the non-wage, non-salary income paid to the owners of the non-human factor of production––productive capital embodied in the assets of business corporations such as productive land, structures, human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.

Pitman suggests that:

…everyone should try to fill a savings account with $100,000 for emergencies. If they haven’t got that, and most people don’t, then they aren’t ready for the kinds of major expenses life is sure to dish out—unemployment, illnesses, accidents, retirement.

This is an admirable goal, but unrealistic when dependent on job wages and salaries for the majority of Americans.

Pitman concludes with a statement that I agree with:

If the wealthy want to be taxed less, they should arrange for society to enrich as many others as possible, in order to have friends who share the “burden” of taxation. If enough people make a decent enough wage to achieve a surplus, it won’t be so lonely at the top. If instead the present trend continues, concentrating the wealth in an ever-shrinking portion of the population, those few wealthy should expect to pay a steep price for membership in that elite club, because the rest of us can’t afford to help pay the taxes until we can afford to take care of ourselves.

Pitman clearly does not recognize the importance and power of broadened private, individual ownership of the future productive capital growth of the American economy––the ONLY solution to empowering EVERY American to accumulate a viable income-producing capital estate instead of relying on jobs, which are being destroyed and degraded by exponential and tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. In other words, JOB CREATION is a dead-end endeavor, even for educated individuals, at the scale to enable the majority of Americans to become self-sufficient.

To explore to lead Americans on a journey to an ownership culture please see my article “Democratic Capitalism And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.com/11/economic-justice/ or follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/For-Economic-Justice/347893098576250 and http://www.facebook.com/editorgary

Also follow the Center for Economic and Social Justice at www.cesj.org and http://capitalhomestead.org/ Join the OWN Team at http://capitalhomestead.org/group/the-on-team

Also see The Kelso Institute at http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/