And just for kicks, let’s say that there was enough land for everyone to have ten acres to farm – just what percentage of the world population do you really think wants to do the hard work that is farming? Furthermore, if you want to remove modern farm equipment from the equation – you could probably stand the number of Americans willing to work that hard shoulder-to-shoulder on one-quarter section of land.

The real problem in America is not “equity” related at all. It is self-responsibility related. People want someone else to do it all for them. Corporations are a good example of that. I listen to people go off about how bad corporations behave all the time and it makes me laugh. Corporations have stockholders. If the corporation is publically traded, the stockholders have a large say in how a corporation is run, and in what executives get paid. Every year in the USA, hundreds of thousands of letters go out to stockholders containing proxy ballots – and most shareholders never even bother to look at them. As long as the corporation is doing well, and the stockholder’s investment is consistently increasing at an unrealistic rate – they, frankly, do not care what the corporation does. “Just give me my thirty percent return on investment.” This is not just rich folks; this is teachers, government workers, healthcare workers, and autoworkers, anyone who has a 401K, IRA, CalPers, Keogh, or other retirement fund. You want to see corporate behavior change –change has to take place with the stockholders.

The gap between the haves and the have-nots in America is a function of the push for people to attend college and to learn to use technology. Today in America 30% of adults have a bachelors degree. When you add to that that most people with college degrees live in metropolitan areas you have a very high percentage of people who earn a very high income, and a smaller percentage of people who have either a high school diploma or are high school drop-outs in service sector jobs. Given that picture, or course there will be a huge disparity between the “rich” and the “Poor.”

There are three things, in the USA, we know for sure about poverty:
1. People who graduate from high school make far more money than people who do not.
2. People who can communicate clearly in written and spoken English make far more money than people who cannot.
3. We have long since left the agrarian age, and labor unions have priced us out of competitiveness in the industrial age, and we have entered the technology age and anyone who is clueless about technology is going to be left behind financially.

What to do about it:

1. Abolish the US income tax code and institute a flat tax of 15% for everyone who works – no deductions, no write-offs. This will result in billions more in Income Tax revenue – and it also makes it so that everyone’s dollar is worth the same amount of money.
2. Eliminate the Federal Minimum Wage. Require all states to set minimum wage laws based on cost of living – county to county. This will cause businesses to move and decentralize spreading employment opportunity all over America, and allow business to locate in places where the labor cost is not so prohibitive that they cannot compete in the global market.
3. Issue a national benefits card to all Americans. This card will have a magnetic strip on the back that will contain your educational achievement levels, your SS# and benefit information and your eligibility for various federal programs.
4. Set up federally funded daycare centers all over cities with a population of 50,000 or more. These daycare centers will provide day care from FREE to low cost on a sliding scale depending on the information on your national benefits card.
5. Require all Americans who do not have a high-school diploma to attend classes so they can sit for and pass the GED exam.
6. Require all Americans to learn to communicate clearly in both written and spoken English. I know that many people have an issue with this – but English is the international language of business and that is not going to change in the next 50 years. It is ironic that in China, India, and Japan all students learn their native language and English as a matter of course.
7. Send all adults that did not attend college for aptitude testing and send them to vocational educational schools. There is a HUGE shortage in electricians, plumbers, automobile mechanics, nurses, crane operators, construction workers, road crews, in fact – in most blue-collar occupations. These are good jobs that pay well. However, fewer and fewer people want to do them because they are not glamorous.
8. Return to building 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 1200 sq ft homes – when I grew up this was the normal sized home for a two parent family with 4 kids. A great many people are priced out of the housing market because no one wants to build high-quality single-family homes of a modest size anymore. When did a 4 bedroom, three baths, 2100 sq. ft. home become the norm for 2 adults and 1.6 children?
9. Reward people for saving. It is time for people to stop living beyond their means. Non-mortgage consumer debt in the USA has topped $2.4 trillion dollars. That is nearly $20K in non-essential consumer debt for every man, woman, and child in the country. This one thing alone will close a good portion of the ‘equity” gap. This total lack of savings is what caused the liquidity problem for the banks. Lots of loans going out, no deposits coming in.

Well, that is my nickel on the subject. Thanks.

Brad K.: I’m extremely skeptical about the economies of scale argument. IMO thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi have demonstrated pretty conclusively that the development of small-scale electrically powered machinery has enabled small factories serving local markets, or even the household and informal economy, to obtain most of the necessary economies of scale in production. And even when unit costs of production are modestly above those of large-scale manufacturers, this is more than offset by the drastically reduced distribution costs that come with producing close to the point of consumption.

One of the problems with the kind of Sloanist production that Chandler and Galbraith celebrated is that it requires overbuilt industry to run at full capacity to minimize unit costs, and that it requires long-term planning to guarantee a market for goods when the whole production cycle requires enormous commitment of capital and years of planning. This means producing to maximize capacity utilization rather than in response to autonomous demand, push-distribution, and planned obsolescence. And even then consumers won’t absorb the full output, which means massive state intervention to absorb surplus output and surplus capital (the permanent war economy, the Interstate and other subsidies to the car culture, etc.).

A couple of chapters I’ve written deal with problems in the orthodox econ of scale position, and describe the decentralist alternative:

Chapter One. A Critical Survey of Orthodox Views on Economy of Scale
Chapter Fourteen. Decentralized Production Technology

You are probably right that Obama’s plan cannot balance the budget – though Bill Clinton managed it – but an unbalanced budget need not lead to us “stupid” people who disagree with you “starving.” If it did, there would be widespread famine after the last several years of Gee Dubya’s blowout spending. Also, if you are a good right-winger, you are supposed to accept the Laffer Curve as an article of faith, are you not? This foundation of voodoo economics says that cutting tax rates actually increases tax revenues – which might be true or might not, depending in part upon what the starting and ending rates are. The GOP has long offered this as an excuse for cutting taxes for the rich. Why are you so sure that it will not operate likewise when taxes are cut for the middle class?

The clueless get what they deserve. I hope starving in their homes gives them warm comfort for how they voted. Change change change? Did they even read his website entirely? No. This country will get what it deserves and I will stand by and watch as the hordes suffer their own bad choices. I hope this does not come to pass. I hope every day as such. But as I say plan for the worst and hope for the best and reality is normally somewhere in between. Welcome to the downfall of the USA. You get what you deserve and vote for…. I hope I am proven wrong and time will tell. No worries here. To the rest…….. enjoy your uneducated vote….. Relish in it for now and experience it later. Gloabl issues dont give a damn about what you think you deserve. It pains me our society has fallen to this level. My concern is when a real crisis hits how many freedoms the people will give up to have the government take care of them. May the wise procreate and the stupid starve while chanting “Change we can believe in.” Again I hope I am wrong. I am not waiting to find out. Enjoy your vote and what it brings you. Clueless.

And yet, what’s happening in the USA has so much impact on the rest of us. Scary, sometimes, at least when it comes to people like GWB and the like.

Growing up in Scandinavia meant having the Soviet Union and the other communist countries next door. It could be frightening, sometimes. But we also learned that they are human beings just like you and me. Almost nobody wanted to live in a centralized socialist state like the SU. But we saw that socialism was not entirely bad and that *democratic* socialism could actually be a good thing sometimes. It’s not all black and white!

I would have liked to invite you to Sweden to see how things work here, but I suppose you would have to travel with a sailing ship or something Transatlantic flights must mean a horrible lot of carbon emissions!

Christina in Sweden
who will follow the election with great interest!

Great site, many wonderful posts and thought provoking discussions. Thanks!

I also refuse to vote the lesser of two evils. The 2 party system is so corrupt. I feel a vote for either is basically the same. I will be writing in Ron Paul, a true Statesman.

In California he is an official write in candidate.

Off to the polls.