On February 21, 2013, the editorial board of The New York Times writes:
To reduce the deficit in a weak economy, new taxes on high-income Americans are a matter of necessity and fairness; they are also a necessary precondition to what in time will have to be tax increases on the middle class. Contrary to Mr. Boehner’s “spending problem” claim, much of the deficit in the next 10 years can be chalked up to chronic revenue shortfalls from the Bush-era tax cuts, which were only partly undone in the fiscal-cliff deal earlier this year. (Wars and a recession also contributed.) It stands to reason that a deficit caused partly by inadequate revenue must be corrected in part by new taxes. And the only way to raise taxes now without harming the recovery is to impose them on high-income filers, for whom a tax increase is unlikely to cut into spending.
The New York Times is awfully LATE in their assessment and advocating taxes. As my friend Perma Bear noted: “We had a once in a generation chance to raise taxes and needed revenues for decades to come simply by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. President Obama and the Democrats, along with all of the moderate and liberal leaning commentators out there bought into the fiscal cliff paranoia. The result is that most of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent, revenues will endlessly come up short, and the Republican Party can endlessly starve the government beast until there is nothing left of it.”
Of course, raising taxes alone is not the solution to the economy’s depression. Until we address and reform the financial structure of the economy the depression will continue and worsen. The problem is that you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption––no production, no growth. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
The task at hand is to reform our financial institutions so that the ownership of productive capital (the non-human means of production) will be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, we must assure that the FUTURE ownership pie getS much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership decreases, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. We need to insure that FUTURE productive capital income is distributed more broadly. The result will be that the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth and provide a robust tax bass to support necessary government functions.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economist and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden ownership in the new capital formation of the future simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate ownership shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital ownership in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/opinion/why-taxes-have-to-go-up.html
