How Economists Invented Austerity & Paved the Way to Fascism

By Clara Mattei

My response:

Social democracy was the cost of abandoning radicalism. The financing of the war saw the rise of the income tax, which allowed for the creation of structural national debt. Debt demanded austerity, while also creating seed capital for the creation of riskier capital assets. Rich people prefer to buy debt securities to paying income tax and fund both sides to do so, but only debt within limits. 

The drive for lower tax rates from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s gave the CEO class an incentive for wage theft that did not occur earlier, when high progressive income taxes took the incentives away from demanding higher incomes through cutting worker wages and benefits.

There is also the racism that demonized users of the welfare state, thus creating a low wage workforce for a lower cost two-tier economy.

For more on the relationship between the national debt and capitalism, see my book Settling (and Squaring) Accounts: Who Really Owns the National Debt? Who Owes It?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0833MWRD1

I am currently updating it with a new title: The National Debt as Class Warfare. The main points are the same, but numbers have been updated and new analyses added on the shifting of resources from the lower to upper class (the middle class remains the same percentage of Adjusted Gross Income).

Mainstream economics is afflicted with both-siderism, where all taxation is seen as a disincentive for work and investment. Investment has been equated with speculation (it is not - but no one challenges that untruth), while the role in high wage taxes to disincentivize wage theft is ignored. 

Problem is, credentialism in think tanks has given a preference to those in the US who had a part in enacting the 1986 tax reform, which gelled Reaganism in place. The tax debate in the US changes the system around the edges, but resists large transformations that would more effectively tax high incomes and transfer wealth to workers.  

I talk about this in The Future is Calling: It Wants a Refund https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QQGDRCP and The Future is Calling: It Wants a Better Job. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QN7WCW8

Backyard Aquaponics Farming Fresh Fish and Vegetables | PARAGRAPHIC

The Demographic Drought

By Ron Hetrick on Lifecast.

Comments:

Low pay is endemic, so it must increase. The problem is math. When you give equal percentage raises rather than equal dollar raises, it produces inequality automatically.

More children are needed, so paying a higher child tax credit is essential, long term.

Go with cars controlled by central computers (not AI) and powered by overhead lines (on the bottom of a covered roof deck) and you will no longer need drivers for people or delivery and can force more people into mass transit by having cars drive them to it from home.

Pay people to go to school up to associates degree, starting when they can enter the workforce. Offer more votech programs. Pay for this with employer based consumption taxes with an offset for training costs (including wages). After AA, tie training to a work requirement, with government provided student loans if work requirement does not work out.

Shift to cooperative ownership. We can no longer afford capitalism. Move low skill labor to consumers. Move to prefab homes built or ordered by cooperative. House younger workers rather than have them find their own housing or live at home. Cooperatives do financing of longer term family housing. Shift longevity payments from turnover to preferred stock in the cooperative, making wages flatter for older workers. 

Create home-based agriculture and cut work hours for those who grow their own food.

This Brand New PREFAB HOME is Coming to a Community Near You!

By Kerry Tarnow.

This would be a good fit for an employer owned firm that wanted to do the whole smart growth, cooperative housing kind of thing - from Single Family homes for workers with families and apartments for new workers and interns still in school. I have a few books about this https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LNJJCQH https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DBYPVRV

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1097350568

An Honest Discussion About A Universal Basic Income

By Economics Explained.

Comment:

Universal is not necessarily fair, especially not to large families. The Zero Population Growth movement and the UBI movement have some overlap. If every person got $1000 per month, we would be in business and could fund it with consumption and asset value added taxes. With every trade, put on a 25% bite (20% of price). The rich will pay.

Minimum wages need to go up to something like $12 per hour in US, or $11 if work week is shortened to 32 hours. Anyone who cannot get a job at that rate can do training (ESL, GED, AA) and be paid the minimum wage to participate. Include $1000 per child per month additional pay for wages or government benefits, funded as an offset to employer paid subtraction value added taxes. 

With 3 VAT streams, plus salary surtaxes on income over $85,000 up to 52% and there is plenty of money.