Recent comments

We took time to read the long and tedious 1971 Powell "manifesto". Today, Big Business (aka corporations) account for only 25% of the economic base (jobs) inside the United States. Since 1981 (ten years after the Powell memo to the chamber of commerce)---and with the undertaxing of Big Business and overtaxing of Small Business on the immediate horizon at that time---American "enterprise" as Mr. Powell refers to it began to shift to Small Business. Big Business took tens of millions of American jobs overseas, thereby gradually muting the portal of upward mobility for the American working class into the middle class---the latter shrinking over the next 30 years. Today, Big Government, Big Business, Big Politics, Big Media, Big Legal (Powell's supreme Court) and what Powell referred to in so many words as Big Education...well...they just don't get it yet---even now after the bottom fell out beginning in 2007 when the Dow fell off a cliff and into a chasm from 14,000 to 6,500. A still undertaxed Big Business and debilitatingly overtaxed Small Business (the latter accounting for the other 75% of jobs inside the United States) is the destabilizing mix that is going to be the undoing of the United States of America in the 21st Century---unless the following take place: 1. Import tariff's must be raised to reduce the market presence of cheap overseas goods produced by the tens of millions of dormitory housed foreign workers @ $1/hour...yes, those selfsame workers that supplanted the tens of millions of American middle class workers whose jobs Big Business exported overseas along with its manufacturing operations and taxes. We are speaking of overseas workers, most of whom cannot even begin to afford the products that they themselves manufacture for export to the United States---and therefore certainly cannot afford products that U.S.-based manufacturers wish to export in the other direction. 2. Small Business whose net profits are below the top marginal threshold of $379,150 must have their taxes cut to no more than 10% (the latter right now being the rate on only the first $17,000 of Small Business Schedule "C" net income). 3. Big Business whose net profits are above the top marginal threshold of $379,150 must have their taxes raised from 35% to the historical top marginal average rate of 70% (the top rate from the early 1960's to 1981...91% having been the top rate before that, and going back to the Korean War and World War II). The following reflects a perilous path for the United States of America: 1. Wealthy Americans and American-in-name only corporations with taxable incomes (including capital gains) and net profits above the top marginal threshold of $379,150 (currently taxed at 35%) are the financial mainstay of political candidates' campaign coffers in Washington, D.C. 2. America will NEVER recover its Small Business middle class manufacturing base and will therefore NEVER halve middle class unemployment from 9% to at least 4.5%---until after the aforesaid tariffs are put in place. 3. America will never put such tariff's in place until the U.S. Government stops borrowing operating revenue from China and other cheap-goods producing countries. 4. America will never stop borrowing until it raises the top marginal federal income tax rate from 35% to the pre-1981/pre-Reagan historical average of 70% on 16th Amendment "INCOMES, FROM WHATEVER SOURCE DERIVED", i.e., taxable incomes (including capital gains) and net profits above the top marginal threshold of $379,150 (currently taxed at 35%). 5. This brings us back to paragraph 1, above, and point of beginning---to include the post-1981/post-Reagan massive borrowing and "printing & minting" that have together 1) put America in debt up to her neck [$15+ trillion U.S. Public Debt, e.g., China; Social Security Trust Fund ($2.5 trillion) compounded by $1+ trillion annual budget deficits] and 2) reduced the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar by 150% since 1981, whereby it takes $2.50 today to purchase what $1.00 purchased in 1981.