This isn’t about ideology, we the people, have been duped into supporting the Corporate welfare state , encouraging stratospheric corporate CEO salaries while the rest of us pick up the crumbs of meager wages to our personal detriment.
There are reasons the middle class has been wiped out. One reason, we’ve let Banks and Bankers run amok, as we gutted Sensible Financial Regulation. The second reason, we’ve been brainwashed to believe that lower taxes leads to job creation. Instead, lower taxes on the wealthy has encouraged a race to the top for them and a race to poverty for the rest of us.
Let me cite some facts. After the World Wars , income inequality was decreased by massive job creation and high individual taxation. There was no incentive to make obscene amounts of money because high incomes were taxable at 80%-90%. This remained true until Ronald Reagan became President and gave tax cuts to the wealthy: initiating Supply Side Economics. The race to the top began. Now, the more money you made the more you kept. By 1997, Clinton had gotten us out of the recession of 1992 which followed the market crash of 1987, and he overturned Glass Steagall and created several laws favoring the creation of lobbyists and derivatives and risky banking products. Income inequality began to spike as everyone piled into banking, brokerage and bank like products, destroying our manufacturing base while creating a plutocratic class that has an appetite for more.
- And why not more? We keep feeding the beasts we’ve created at the expense of the multitudes and the greater good.
- Productivity remains unchanged, but innovation has decreased drastically.
There is a way to level the playing field, but Plutocrats are not going to be happy with the solutions. We could, according to Thomas Piketty, create a tax on capital. A progressive tax that brings revenue back into the system, that is totally accountable and allocated for specific programs and jobs. No more opacity in any system.
Transparency is possible in this age of computers and social media. Shining the light on wealth creation, taxing wealth similar to the years when America had real prosperity , will encourage innovation and productivity once again. Ideas and concepts that have been stifled by the few at the expense of the many will once again flourish.
I would not be speaking about Thomas Piketty’s book on “Capital in the 21 st Century” , if Piketty hadn’t convinced me that the exponential growth of Plutocrats was unstoppable in the environment we have created. It’s never too late to correct mistakes. We should agree that our state of inequality is unsustainable and create a progressive tax on capital that levels the playing field making job creation possible and saving the future for our kids and grand kids.
Anything is possible if we unite behind a single cause. Saving Middle Class Americans is right. Then we work on making the world a better place for everyone. As we change all systems to reflect a Global Tax on Wealth. One rule. One monetary standard for everyone to live by. Open trade agreements that assure fair trade with sanctions levied against nation states failing to comply. This is not utopian but living under Plutocratic rule here and everywhere is tantamount to slavery. The status quo is no longer acceptable.
I want nothing less then Democracy that works for all of us and I want it now. Who will join me? We have nothing left to lose and everything to gain! We’re all in this together. Will the people speak?
