On January 31, 2013, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas write on The Washington Post’s Wonkblog:
Wonkbook’s Number of the Day: -0.1 percent. That’s the annualized contraction in America’s gross domestic product, according to the most recent report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The first decline since 2009, it is driven by sharp drops in defense spending and inventories.
Wonkblog’s Graph of the Day: 90 percent of entitlement benefits go to people older than 65, the disabled, and the working poor.
Wonkbook’s Top 5 Stories: 1) The American economy shrinks for the first time since 2009; 2) the Fed’s latest meeting; 3) the many holes in the individual mandate; 4) Obama’s schedule for immigration reform; and 5) the Senate’s gun debate.
Just think about it. With government defense spending and the make-work associated with the military-industrial complex, the economy would have grown AT A PUNY 1.27 percent pace! At below 10 percent growth rates there is NO WAY that the United States will ever by able to eliminate deficits and substantially pay down the national debt while maintaining social programs supported by tax extraction and further incurring national debt.
The military-industrial complex of subsidized private sector contractors and a war machine far greater than the combined military expenditures of the other countries in the world is a primary reason the American economy is chugging along, even at such a slow pace. Instead of over-subsidizing wasteful military expenditures we need to reform the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. Such productive capital investment should be to produce REAL products and services that society needs and wants, while ensuring that through full-payout dividend income the new FUTURE owners will have income to engage in the economy as “customers with money.”
The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. As well national debt needs to be focused on growing the private sector of the economy simultaneously with facilitating private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital formation. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
Sign the WhiteHouse.gov petition at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reform-federal-reserve/PhY3Jswk
Such policies will address our greatest problem, that being most Americans are not earning enough income to properly support themselves and their families. The country is experiencing a widening divide between an elite income class with well-paid salaries and dividend and capital gain income from stock ownership and low-pay wage earners and those dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare funded by extracting taxes and incurring national debt. This situation will continue to worsen. Americans need to WAKE UP and realize that the FUTURE is one of technological unemployment. 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. And as a result, most American incomes will decline, which will result in a downturn in the economy as there will be fewer and fewer “customers with money” to purchase the products and services society needs and wants. The result: no or significantly reduced opportunity for income.
This is the NEW REALITY! The obvious, logical solution is for people to OWN THE MACHINES and non-human means of production that result from technology.
