The
Internet is full of complaints about our current political and
economic arrangements. Our current political economy has led to a
reduction in the number of semi-skilled jobs, a stagnation of real
wages, a loss or substantial reduction in manufacturing businesses,
financial gambling and speculation, more frequent and severe
recessions, and the observation that our political representatives
are more responsive to corporate interests than to the needs and
wants of our people. So, there is a lot to complain about! But we
need to do more than complain. We need to explore remedies.
Conservatives
have been offering up the same remedies for over 30 years now: tax
cuts, chiefly for the wealthy; and corporate deregulation. Are we
better off now? Rich people are. The rest of us, not so much. Look
at Kansas.
**What
conservatives have been saying is, “Only rich lives matter.”**
The rest of us are just slugs feeding off of what trickles
down
from the wealthy. So you get “avoid and neglect” conservatism:
avoid the problems and neglect the victims. Just make sure the rich
get richer. Well, only
a fool continues to do the same thing expecting different results!
So
I’ve combed through books and articles by some economists I think
are more progressive, or post-neoliberal, for ideas that are likely
to *really*
improve the economic lives of the 99% of Americans. I found answers
in works by economists Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Ha-Joon Chang,
and a number of others. There’s a bibliography at the end of this
post, for anyone who wants to read more about these ideas and the
rationales behind them.
Gathering
and sifting through their ideas, the following struck me as most
consequential:
-
**Increase jobs for the 99%**
-
Make public investments in domestic infrastructure projects.
-
Take measures to encourage growth and survival of labor-intensive industrial sectors, especially those critical to national security and independence. Such measures could include:
-
Subsidies for Research and Development;
-
Subsidized credit;
-
Direct lending by public institutions;
-
Regulation of industrial investments;
-
Export assistance; and
-
Support for needed training.
-
-
End tax deferment on corporate profits earned abroad. Deferment discourages repatriation of earnings.
-
Enact a financial transaction tax, to dampen speculation, reduce financial market volatility, and encourage longer-term investment.
-
Take measures to further reduce corporate monopolies, trusts and cartels. For example, reduce the scope and duration of patents.
-
**Increase income for the 99%**
-
Raise the minimum wage
-
Raise the Earned Income Tax Credit
-
Make unionizing easier and penalize anti-union actions more severely
-
**Reduce burdens on the 99%**
-
Make voting easier, for example, with weekend elections and more voting stations
-
Restore student loan bankruptcy protections
-
Push for the Durbin Amenndment to the Dodd-Frank Bill, which will bring down the excessive fees that the debit card companies now impose on merchants, and which are passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices
- Create a homeowners' Chapter 11, analogous to corporate Chapter 11
-
Reduce the likelihood of forced financial industry bailouts, by
-
Increasing capital surcharges for the largest banks
-
Requiring all lending institutions to document how they plan to unwind in the event of bankruptcy
-
Establishing strict rules for bailouts and reimbursement of public funds
-
[I would add prosecution for bailouts necessitated by malpractice!]
-
-
Remove special protections for derivatives in corporate bankruptcies
- Raise the top marginal income tax rate.
-
Tax capital gains and dividends at the same rates as wages
-
Reduce opportunities and means for tax evasion
-
Eliminate costly tax breaks
-
Apply value-added taxes [VATs] to luxury items
-
**Increase benefits for the 99%**
-
Enact “Medicare for All,” of course.
-
Subsidize pre-K childcare.
-
Provide public financial support for post-secondary education.
-
Enable the Postal Service to provide a public-banking option.
-
Create a public option for housing finance.
-
Expand Social Security by removing payroll caps, and add public options for additional retirement investing, like the Thrift Savings Program for Federal employees.
-
**Improve the quality of life for the 99%**
-
Restrict political donations to *natural citizens*, and maintain low donation limits
-
Tax pollution (including carbon emissions)
-
Work with other nations to change the WTO’s rules, interpretations of rules, policies, goals and overall agenda so that the needs of populations are treated as more important than the desires of corporations.
-
Require that international trade agreements be approved by the International Labor Organization [ILO]
-
Join with other nations to create an International Finance Organization (IFO), whose chief objective would be to reduce the risk of international financial meltdowns. The IFO would be responsible for things like:
-
Establishing rules for international finance
-
Ensuring transparency and accountability in international finance
-
Monitoring and reporting developments in international finance
-
Supervising the IMF and World Bank
-
I’m
sure that Conservatives will call these ideas “socialist,” even
though ***there’s
no proposal that the government should own the means of production
and distribution.***
That would be the dictionary definition of Socialism.
But
Conservatives will call anything “socialist” that limits
self-centered, narrow-minded behavior.
These
proposals actually assume that ***there
will be private property***
and that ***there
will be private markets.***
**They
just shouldn’t have unfettered control over the political and
economic lives of the American people!**
The American people, to ensure their general welfare, must have
priority over ***them.***
**Alex
Budarin**
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
**Ha-Joon
Chang and Ilene Grabel,**
*Reclaiming
Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual,*
Zed
Books Ltd., 2004/2014
**John
Eatwell
and Lance Taylor,**
*“Towards
an Effective Regulation of International Capital Markets,”*
Internationale
Politik und Gesellschaft, 3/99
**Robert
Reich,**
*Aftershock:
The Next Economy and America's Future,*
Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010
**Joseph
Stiglitz,**
* "The Coming Great Transformation,"* Journal of Policy Modeling, 2017
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