Pick up a newspaper. Listen to the radio. Watch TV. Catch the latest fixed wisdom from a pol of any stripe talking about helping the middle class and improving American living standards. The rap these days is always the same. The emphasis is always the same. Proclaimed endlessly. We have to focus on job creation and expanding the economy.
Really? Why?
We’re already creating a lot of jobs. The economy is already growing. And the living standards of a growing number of Americans is still stagnant at best and increasingly on the decline.
The reasons are obvious. Most of the new jobs being created are lousy jobs, part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, jobs that don’t provide a good standard of living. And the growth in the economy for at least a decade has all gone to the top one or two percent of Americans, not gone toward improving the living standards of other Americans.
Is that what our economic ruling class wishes to perpetuate? What you wish to perpetuate?
So what’s the alternative? What would work to create better jobs, better living standards for most Americans, so that the majority gets the benefits of growth it deserves because it is the true generator of this growth?
There is, of course, no single answer to this question. But as I write often, the most direct and obvious way to at least start the economic healing is to increase the tax rates of the rich and apply ALL the additional revenue generated toward reducing the tax rates of the working middle class and poor. This would directly and immediately create more and better jobs, and generate more economic growth whose benefits would get into the hands of more Americans
This will never happen! you say, because the present politics in this country would prevent it from happening. No one can deny that. However…
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. The time for this one to arrive is not yet. The time to enter it into the political discussion lists in every way possible has arrived.
Common sense. Common decency. Necessity. They all come together in this simple idea. So it will come. Perhaps sooner than most people expect.
Hey. All you 2016 presidential candidate wannabes. Look this way. Either party’s wannabes welcome.
(Now available from Amazon in print and ebook formats — Michael Silverstein’s The Devil’s Dictionary Of Wall Street.)