In this article published in The Potomac, D. R. Thompson argues that non-financial problems facing the US today, such as energy, environment, poverty, debt addiction, health, and education are all interrelated with financial system and connot be addressed separately. The solution that Thompson provides to this contemporary inter related problems is the creation of a Joint Economic Policy Office and the implementation of basic income. Basic income, according to the author, could be financed through revenues that go to social welfare security and unemployment money and social dividends can get their money from government owing large percentages of the financial system. Then, argues the author, there could be a global initiative of debt forgiveness for all the nations, so that we do not leave the debt for future generations and make them as debt addictive society as we are today. Many would argue that this idea is socialistic, but Thomson has a counter argument, which states that this system would not undermine individuality, and government will have no say in how the basic income money would be spent.
Thompson D. R. (2009). “Emerson Meets Wall Street: Systems Think, the Citizen Dividend, and Economic Democracy.” The Potomac, online at: https://thepotomacjournal.com/np-dthompson999.htm.
Flip a la Mode: Rather than skimming the cream from the fat of the land for the sole benefit of insider games of speculation, it seems sane, for a change, to financially engineer win-win scenarios, that circulate currency to both consumer-customers and producer customers, thereby supporting the health of American society as well as the global community.
Here are two suggestions for consideration:
* Penalize profiteering from “fruits of the poisonous tree”, e.g. water fluoridation, EMF-smog, tin cans, radioactive coal dust, oil spills, HHO, HAARP, MSG: Policies that undermine public health become reduced to barely rational behavior bordering on psychotic. Insofar as the detrimental effect to individual health causes a reduction in efficiency of allotted basic income, the economic outcome becomes readily quantifiable as a devaluation of the initial investment.
* Reduce the cost of failure, error and mistakes: R&D is necessary for human advancement and societal progress;paradoxically, the resulting value of the acquired knowledge appears consistently inversely proportional to the project-level failure to success ratio of the trial-and-error empirical approach. (Moral hazards hover like vultures above the obvious ethical ramifications of certain academic pursuits).
Is it possible, that Humanity’s problems on Earth are largely a cascade of simple consequences due to poorly chosen accounting definitions producing a situation that’s ‘molded,’ to use the vernacular? Good will towards all men, women, children, animate organisms, inanimate entities and Water would seem to lead, necessarily, to unlimited, egalitarian prosperity. Why are we waiting, again?
Nurture Success, America.