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The 86 Million Invisible Unemployed (Demo)

New York (CNNMoney, May 4,2012):

“There are far more jobless people in the United States than you might think.”

“While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of nonworking adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth.”

“It’s a worrisome sign for the economy and partly explains why the unemployment rate has been falling recently. Only people looking for work are considered officially unemployed.”

“That poses a problem for a variety of reasons.”

“It hits tax revenue and makes it harder to fund social safety nets like Social Security. Not to mention, it’s likely to increase income inequality.”

“Most importantly though, it makes the U.S. economy less productive and weighs on growth.”

In light of the exponential of job-destroying technological advancement, this condition will continue to worsen until our leaders adopt a path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice founded on policies and programs that embrace technological advancements and empower ALL citizens to acquire private, individual ownership stakes in the growth corporations responsible for using superautomation, automated factories, robotics and digitally computerized process to produce products and services. This can be faciliated through insured pure capital credit financing mechanisms by which corporations would issue and sell new stock that would be acquired by ordinary Americans. Those acquiring the newly issued stock would pay back the insured loans out of the future (savings) earnings of the investments.

While government can lead the way our of this Great Recession with infrastructure stimulus and investment in services such as education and safety, as a nation we need to focus on private sector growth bolstered with broadening the private, individual ownership of new wealth creation in the form of new productive capital formation investments, which as a benefit will result in full employment.

But true to conventional economist thinking President Obama and his economic advisors, as well as Republican leaders, continue to be stuck in one-factor economic thinking––JOBS and the Labor Worker as the ONLY means to earning a living. Without government  coerced trickle-down through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed, not only would government jobs cease to exist but private sector jobs also would spiral in decline.

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 (the non-human factor) ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.

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.

Binary economist Louis Kelso was quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land, structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”

The one sure way to close the “jobs gap” is to adopt the scenario where new economic growth is financed with mechanisms that extend pure insured capital credit to ALL citizens to acquire newly issued shares of stock in our major corporations and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings generated by the new productive capital assets (non-human factor of production), and gain greater access to “real” job opportunities that a growth economy generates. And as this new economy takes form with the secondary benefit of creating “real” job opportunities, ALL citizens within a generation or so will have acquired a viable ownership stake in the future economy that will earn them income for the rest of their lives.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/03/news/economy/unemployment-rate/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2

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