4. Create wealth through small business – provide startup capital in the form of micro loans, technical assistance and training to small scale entrepreneurs’. Restructuring disability and retirement through increased social security taxes would result in an explosion of creative entrepreneurship. Private retirement fund assets and liabilities would be moved into this system with restructured benefits allowing a living wage. While some would lose retirement income the majority would not. It’s better than losing it all, ask a GM or Ford retiree. Take the income cap off from social security; you pay on all of your earnings including capital gains.
5. Pass the Employee Free Choice Bill – Allowing workers to sign up to join a union on a card rather than a company wide vote announced months in advance would allow workers to restore the balance between them and management that has bled consumers of the buying power to keep the economy going. The secret elections argument is totally bogus. Why do you think companies are pouring millions of dollars into a campaign to insure secret worker elections? It allows them months to bully, intimidate, threaten and coerce workers into voting against their own interests. While union membership has dropped to 12.1 percent, 55 percent of Americans say they would join one if given a chance.
6. Raise taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, wealth and high income. Yes that’s right raise taxes, redistribute wealth, take it from the rich and invest it in the people who create most of the wealth in this economy. The rich are hoarding their remaining wealth to take advantage of further concentrating their power with fire sale buyouts or surviving the downturn in style.
People at the bottom of the income pile spend that money and they pay a greater portion of their income in taxes reinvigorating the economy and tax revenues. Raising taxes would encourage longer term investment into products and efficiencies necessary for building a sustainable society and economy instead of speculation in arcane financial instruments that only produce paper profits to justify ridiculous bonuses and salaries.
Chances are most of these solutions will not be adopted, or at least until conditions may well be beyond salvaging, they will seem much too radical to most. I guess allowing banks and other companies to use taxpayer bailout money to continue bonuses to failed and corrupt executives, acquire healthy competitors, and salvage buggy companies seems to make more sense to most people. We are a prisoner of our labels and limited imagination. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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