The Obama tax cuts passed with the President's vigorous leadership reestablished the low, low tax rates on millionaires and billionaires that cannot pay for the federal budget. The Presidents budget criteria plans for a trillion dollars of federal deficit for each year of the next decade bring the total U.S. public debt then to 26 trillion dollars with the interest on that debt being more each year than the present cost of funding the Department of Defense. The fundamental economic problem with the economic picture is that government spends too much in trying to keep up with the immense global economic and political power of global corporations.
The United States had intelligent founders able to invent a constitution that provided for an economic paradigm supported by the state of the art of business and the demographic realities of the era. The economic philosopher Adam Smith wrote in the same era his brilliant tome 'On the Wealth of Nations'. The current national intelligence for political philosophy generally relies on that economic theory of 1776. Adam Smith if alive today would reinvent and reform the prospects for free enterprise in order to liberate a nation from the snares of concentrated power and wealth.
Reduction of the size of corporations and government ought to accentuate the positive elements of free enterprise and full employment. The poor should be natural supporters of vouchers for private schools to break-up the multi-thousand union student ranches. Reducing the vast size of public schools,corporations and government while increasing ecospheric health ought to create new jobs.
The U.S. middle class faces challenging times ahead. It has been in decline since the end of the cold warn and even the past 30 years. As a class it has average intelligence and yet consumes more than perhaps half of the rest of the people of the nations of the Earth without really contributing more than people of average intellect would. With the post cold-war labor and intellectual market driven by billions of hungry people that condition of privilege isn't likely to continue with the current economic style.
Adam Smith however would have reformed capitalism to enable free enterprise to flourish once more outside the totalizing strictures of global corporate power. When global corporations grow large and government declines the era of pure corporatism envisioned by Mussolini and Hitler develops with the corporations becoming the big brother of a compliant revolving door government. The government appoints the same people from party to party because neither party does more than serve the will of the financial and economic elite.
Saving free enterprise from corporate hegemony and the fiction of corporations as individuals requires a cap on the number of employees any corporation might have that once to do business in the U.S.A. at just 5000 individuals. With fewer employees intelligence will become more important that management networking and racketeering of the system. With far more corporations and businesses with fewer than 5000 employees inventiveness and adaptability will become features, neither will technologies become 'too big to change' such as the automotive industry with more than a century of inertia driving perpetual renewal of the highway bill at about a half trillion dollars.
In order to increase competition and break up second degree monopolies through networking no individual with American citizenship could lawfully own shares in more than three corporations. No foreign national could buy shares in more than three U.S. corporations.
Another good idea would be to cut taxes in the reformed era on high-end earners, yet to raise inheritance taxes on estates of more than fifty million dollars in present terms to about 51%. There should be no penalty on an individual earning a lot from his business on merit so long as he does it within the legal criteria, nor should they be discouraged by not being able to pass on an inheritance to their descendents. With a 51% inheritance tax rate on large estates a non-productive generation would experience the regular reduction of their capital to the average social condition.
The point of competition with full employment and opportunity for all to start an enterprise without being repressed by networks, collectives and organizations of any sort is the pursuit of happiness. Human beings natural seek after their interests and good-even mathematicians pursuing construction of a program to disprove Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems are being idle gamers consuming just for the heck of it.
The United States may encounter real climate turbulence in the years and decades ahead with global warming desiccating productive farmland. A remedy should be to develop a vast public works desalinization of saltwater project to bring Wets Texas and the Midwest into an irrigated condition. Areas for wildlife should be thrown in to the reclamation project also getting a share of a man-made natural desalinization project exploiting gravity, solar power, evaporation and condensation.
The United States' middle class is the target of much political gamesmanship by the elites today even as they face the challenges of social and climate decline in the years ahead. Very likely continuing public debt increase will create a catastrophe shift toward a terminal dust-bowl future. The futurist and inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis James Lovelock foresees a challenged Earth reduced to a population of 200 million in the centuries ahead through climate overheating and economic collapse. Alaska may become the last resort for surviving Americans. Considering that state with even 30 million citizens in 50 of 70 years is breathtaking. If the Arctic ice pack is now in progressive decay and a rapid increase of global heating follows in the next couple of decades the present global corporate economic leadership is completely inadequately prepared to provide leadership.
Democracy is an important thing for the quality of life of average citizens, yet as Aristotle observed they tend to not lead themselves in a good direction and lapse into picking a dictator. Autocratic societies though are inflexible on permitting free enterprise and inventions that might disturb their control of political power. The remedy for the United States now ought to be for a reform to capitalism, a refocus on public participation and leadership in church, environmental recovery and space exploration and a securing of our national borders in order that political self-determination can continue to be possible. The self-determination should be more than a determination for debauchery, personal, social and environmental decay.
The Obama administration recently announced that it would allow oil drilling in the high Arctic of Alaska's national Petroleum Reserve sprawling nearly across half of the northern littoral of the state. It will also allow a network of oil pipeline to be built to support offshore oil drilling. The high Arctic is the region of the world with the greatest increase in global heating. It is also experiencing an increasing ozone hole and is a location where the pollution from fossil fuel machines can most affect climate change. Plainly the Democrat Party has insufficient concern about reversing global heating to take a stand on the development of oil and destruction of the health of the ecosphere.
Human beings are a biological life form with self-awareness. Automobile engines and other machine carbon exhaust is a non-biological contribution on a vast scale increasing the Co2 in the Earth's atmosphere-more than the ecosphere in balance without the human contribution can balance-thus the atmospheric heating that may bring about the end of human life. It is something to be serious about.