What to do about the past 50 years of American life – policy suggestions

A reader of my recent post, “Bernie Sanders got much right about our current situation….” commented: “Thank you Mark for validating what we know to be true with real data. Now what do we do about it?”

My perspective on our situation has shifted because I have come to recognize that American life has been transformed over the past 50 years. The Trump era, following 2016, marks the culmination of a long campaign by the wealthy and corporations to tilt the system in their favor. It is time to reorganize our affairs to benefit the bottom 90% of the population.

  • Reform our political system – ending oligarchy
    • Build a politics around a different ethos:
      “The difference between a Western settler mindset of, I have rights and an indigenous mindset of I have an obligation… Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.”1
    • End all political donations by corporations to candidates, parties, and interest groups. Money does not equal speech. Corporations are not human beings with the rights of human beings. They are creatures invented for limited economic purposes.  We should also limit individual contributions by human beings to $1,000 and prohibit anonymous contributions.2
  • Reform our economy
    • Comprehensive anti-trust action to bring competitive capitalism back to life
    • All companies, publicly traded or private, with annual sales of over $1 million must publicly report their audited results and real ownership.
    • End secret shell corporations and secret banking.3
    • End the financialization of corporations. Stock buybacks should cease.4 The ratio of top management pay (including all benefits and bonuses in any form, including stock options) to average hourly worker’s pay and benefits should be capped at 25 to 1 (the ratio was 25 to 1 in the 1950s, a boom time for the economy). This rule applies to every type of corporation, including for-profit, non-profit, and public entities.
    • Dismantle the speculative finance sector. Return to Glass-Steagall rules separating commercial banking from investment banking. No more derivatives, hedge funds, and all the other gambling that has no productive function in the real economy. If money people want to gamble, let them set up private markets that do not have government bailout protections or expose people outside of these private markets to their risks.
    • Develop an approach to the financial extraction strategies of Private Equity firms to end their destructive practices. Make them produce value in products and services rather than just extract money. End favorable tax breaks for Private Equity.
    • End government subsidies to energy companies
    • Make corporations more responsible for their actions and inactions, particularly regarding external costs to society, pollution, worker health, and the health consequences of their products.
    • Return employment to a full-time, permanent workforce model. End contingent, 1099 employment as a business strategy. Essentially, return to the rules that worked from roughly 1940 to 1980. This would apply to higher education, nonprofits, government entities, and the private sector. To provide flexibility, rules can be developed to allow entities to employ part-time, temporary employees as a small portion of their total workforce.
    • Work to achieve unionization of 40% or more of the public and private workforce. This establishes competitively determined wage floors.
    • A living wage is set regionally and indexed to inflation automatically. Include ALL workers in this scheme, including farm workers, domestic labor, retail, higher education teachers (adjunct professors), etc.5
  • Reform social policies
    • Use Federal spending to ensure that everyone who wants or needs a job has one. These jobs should focus on large societal needs the private sector does not meet.6
    • Provide a living income to temporarily or permanently disabled individuals.
    • Increase the retirement benefits from Social Security to make it a livable retirement system for everyone. Fund this by ending income caps.
    • End tax breaks for the rich and corporations. Make the tax burdens proportional to the income and assets of individual and business taxpayers. A truly progressive tax system. Those with more resources provide a higher level of support.
    • Actively work to eliminate billionaires. No democratic, equitable, and sustainable society should produce billionaires. Eliminate transgenerational transfers of wealth over $1 million to any individual.
    • Healthcare should be a right. For-profit healthcare should be eliminated — essentially, Medicare for all. The system can be modeled on the robust universal healthcare systems currently available in every other developed at half the cost.7
    • The government should build housing for the bottom 50% of the population – end segregated housing. 2024 began with 770,000 people homeless.
    • End exclusionary single-family suburban zoning.
    • Universal free daycare and early childhood education. Head Start for all.
    • Fund primary and secondary public education from general state taxes, not real estate taxes. Make funding equal for all students in a state. Reintegrate charter schools into the public education system. Look to countries like The Netherlands for models of supporting a range of educational styles while maintaining standards.
    • Restore public funding for public higher education. Broaden post-secondary education to encompass the skills required for trades.  Make public higher education tuition-free.
    • Fully fund public legal defenders, end cash bail, shorten prison sentences – end our status as Number 1 in incarceration in the developed world.
    • Foster community development that is not car-centric but mass transit-centric. Do not support further suburban and exurban sprawl.
    • End anonymity on the web and in the public domain. Ensure that every person creating content of every kind is concretely identifiable, including those creating corporate content on the web. Introduce communication transparency so that people can be held accountable for what they say and do in public. This includes AI and AI-derived information. Humans should know when they are in the presence of an AI device or AI-produced creation and know exactly who controls the AI system involved. Support a general principle of visibility and accountability in society.
  • Reform our foreign policy
    • Demilitarize the Federal budget. Bring our per capita spending into line with our global competitors. End the cycle of US interventions around the world.
    • Repatriate US military personnel and close the more than 750 military, CIA, DEA, and other departments’ bases outside the US.
    • End US interference and intrusions into other countries’ politics – so frequently done under the guise of spreading democracy
    • End US support for free market austerity policies enforced by the World Bank and other international institutions.
  • The Future
    • Implement emergency actions to reduce coal, gas, and oil use throughout the economy and society. The government should undertake this with the same intensity as we addressed the needs of fighting WWII.
    • Establish a national research campaign to develop and market alternatives to, or alternative production methods for, the four most energy-intensive elements of modern life: steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizer.8
    • Launch a national conversation about developing a vision for a sustainable, equitable, no-growth economy.

Of course, all of this begs the question of how a political party can emerge to win elections and implement change to benefit the bottom 90%.

Footnotes

  1. This quote is attributed to Indigenous Cherokee elder Stan Rushworth. The quote became popular on social media in various forms, most recently in September 2020.
  2. An underlying theme here is that anonymity is inimical of a healthy, egalitarian society.
  3. See the call to end anonymity in public life below
  4.  Company stock buybacks were illegal price manipulation until the regulations were changed in 1982 under President Reagan.
  5. See the MIT Living Wage Calculator for example data on living wages for various family sizes and locations.
  6. Attention must be paid not to exceed the capacity of any sector of the economy because that would provoke inflation.
  7. See my “Video Post – It’s time to admit that US health system is 3rd rate, or worse” for more about the performance of our healhtcare system.
  8. See Smil, Vaclav. How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future. UK: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2022.

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