Americans pay LESS income tax now than 1979.
Bet you didn't know that. Especially if you listen to the screamers on Fox News or to ANY GOP politician. But it's TRUE.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office just published its annual analysis of Americans’ income and taxes, and guess what – the average American household pays 19.3% of its income in federal taxes. The middle 60% of families pay just 13%.
Tax rates were about 6 percentage points HIGHER in 1979 and relatively stable at those levels, until Congress began to cut them starting in the late 1990s.
So, if the tax burden is actually hitting an historic low, and the unemployment rate has shrunk to pre-2008 levels, why is the Middle Class STILL suffering so much?
And won't MORE JOBS solve the problem?
Seems like it would, but, Nope.
MORE low paying jobs just slows the bleeding... a little. Sort of.
Raising the Minimum Wage won't help that much either. Equalizing pay between the genders should definitely be done, but it won't move the needle one bit regarding overall wealth inequality between the 1% and all the little worker bees.
The real problem lies in the lies about "capitalism". American "capitalism" is supposed to work for everyone in the society. You know the rhetoric... work hard, act responsibly, blah, blah, blah, and you'll enjoy a prosperous, fulfilling life. BS on steroids.
And now the GOP has a choke-hold on almost every legislative body; federal, state and local, in the Country. Not to mention the majority votes in the Supreme Court. What chance do you see for a beneficial "Jobs Bill" to exit this new Congress? How will the votes come down on raising the Minimum Wage? See women getting Equal Pay laws anytime soon?
I know, I know... it all seems pretty bleak right now. But that's exactly the best time to start thinking radically.
It's time to resurrect some brilliant ideas that happened before their time. It's called Binary Economics.
Have you ever read The New Capitalists, by Louis O. Kelso? You should. It was published in 1961. It's basic ideas may have been espoused 50 years too soon -- but they are PERFECT for today!
Kelso, an attorney and economics professor, invented the ESOP. In 1986, along with his daughter, Patricia Hetter Kelso, published Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution Through Binary Economics.
It sounds incredibly dull, and maybe too wonky for most folks, but it details EXACTLY what we progressives should be advocating in order to correct the systemic flaws in the current unbridled version of American Capitalism that subjugates "workers".
Kelso's theories concern the effect of technological change on the distributive dynamics of a private property, free market economy. Technological change, Kelso concluded, makes tools, machines, structures and processes ever more productive while leaving human productivity largely unchanged. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy (whose distributive principle is "to each according to his production") delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contributions through labor.
Differential productiveness over time concentrates market-sourced income in the hands of those who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer goods and services. They already have most of what they want and need, so they invest their excess in new productive power. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck which makes the private property, free market economy ever more dysfunctional.
The symptoms of dysfunction are capital concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the majority of people who depend entirely on wage income. And since, as Adam Smith laid down, economic demand begins with the consumer and consumer purchasing power, the production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled.
I think the leaders of Occupy Wall Street should adopt Kelso as their patron Saint and start organizing a new political community based on Binary Economics. And the next time a media reporter asks an Occupier what he/she hopes to accomplish, their response should be "Binary Economic Justice"!
That's radical thinking I can get behind.