We don't even need to wholescale replace capitalism. We just need to break it down so that it's useful. If we use capitalism as a carrot system rather than a stick system, it would be a real motivator to bring the economy back in line with the 1%s expectations. By that I mean this: A split system of capitalism and socialism where the brightest and best of the poor actually have social mobility to move into the capitalist side of things instead of being largely locked into poverty unless they get hugely lucky on an insane gamble.
We as a country have the resources to provide every single citizen with basic housing, utilities, medicine, education, and food. Every single citizen. Problem is, those resources are being wasted at an alarming rate by not only our federal government, but also the states, and the rest are being hoarded by the upper echelon of the elite who are absolutely not using that wealth for the benefit of the country. There are a lot of processes needed to make change, but until we get the "landed elite" types out of government, those changes will not take place. Who would actively harm their own status? Quite frankly, loopholes in various financial laws need to be closed to prevent the massive, but legal, tax evasion that corporations and the uber-wealthy have made an art form of. People are earning hundreds of millions and corporations are earning
billions and they are getting tax refunds. This is costing us hundreds of millions of tax dollars. Waste and fraud are costing us several billion a year,
including $95 billion in overlapping programs and $115 billion in medicare fraud alone. (Note: I wouldn't believe the absurd number they throw out there for a total, because most of it comes from "Rebuilding Iraq," and it's our damned fault that it needs to be rebuilt in the first place. The US should have no place in worldbuilding, IMHO. We never should have propped up Saddam in the first place, but here we are, asshole deep in a quagmire that we largely created.) We're wasting billions of dollars a year on the "war on drugs". The 2014
net tax gap estimate is $290 billion. That's just straight up people and companies who didn't pay their taxes.
There is a stupidly large abuse, fraud, and waste problem in the United States. What are we doing to punish this problem? Essentially nothing. It's too expensive to enforce. We issue fines, but those rarely get paid because it's too costly to take them to court. Furthermore, it's estimated that we would
actually save a huge amount of money by switching to single-payer healthcare. On top of just the administrative costs, you also eat a huge chunk of healthcare fraud and waste by streamlining the system to collect payments (and making it more difficult to file false reports.)
So, if we outline the social strata to ensure that healthcare, education, food, shelter and basic utilities (electricity, gas, and water/sewer/garbage collection,) are rights instead of luxuries, we would invigorate the economy because a) people would be able to purchase luxuries, and b) people would be able to dig themselves out of poverty by just working hard instead of taking on massive debt and then attempting to invest or start their own businesses, of which a huge percentage fail in the very first year. If you give people the tools to do better than minimum, most of them will, even if the reason is simply to be better than someone else. Yes, some would just live happily at the very minimum that the government would pay for (and there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. They're still going to participate in society and the economy at large.) Not everyone would go on to earn a college degree and work in insanely high paying careers, but if everyone had the chance to move up the ladder a little, then you create more taxpayers, and in turn more taxes for the government to collect. You energize the tax-base and jumpstart the economy by just ensuring that people have what they need and letting them work for what they want. Furthermore, buying luxuries creates jobs in the manufacturing and retail/service sectors. If you can afford to go out to eat, you provide a job for a cook and a waiter/ress. If you can afford a car or tv or game console or shoes or whatever, you provide jobs to factory workers. (In turn, if companies were heavily punished, say with prison time or banned sales for serious offenders, for using sweatshop/slave labor in foreign countries and faced tariffs for importing goods from cheap labor countries and incentivized to use US labor instead, you provide more American jobs.) If those people in turn can afford to get luxury items or services, they provide jobs in turn and
everyone wins. After all, CEOs and obscenely rich people still exist in my (admittedly highly idealistic) scenario, there's just less of a gap between the poorest and the richest.
To combat the serious poverty and wealth inequality issue that we face, we need to redefine what our own human rights are as Americans and we also need to improve the buying power of the dollar. By reducing the huge amount of waste, fraud, and overlap, punishing tax evasion, and combining these measures with efforts to revalue the dollar with various approaches (limiting toxic debts, capping markups, ensuring livable wages and hours, providing minimum necessities, ensuring jobs stay in the States, et al,) we can make the country not only better for everyone below the top 1% wealthiest of the population, but also improve our economic health in the long run.
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Topic: Let's debate: Minimum wage addition (Read 4865 times)