On everything but food and essentials. Maybe a luxury tax? Even a tax on wall street trades of 1% (even less than that) would generate several trillion dollars. I agree, it's good to rely on tax revenue whenever we can, to not need to "print" more money, but as I've shown if the US federal government creates more money and allocates it to infrastructure development, that increases our production capacity. It makes us more productive and increases our ability to fund more needed projects. Funding the right activities only grows our economy, it doesn't undermine it. Certain people just don't want the government to do anything.
They want the "invisible hand" of the "free market" to take care of everything, Well, the invisible hand can't meet all of our needs. It's often the case that market adjustments can cause a great deal of harm to the public, when not mitigated by government policy. Invisible hands have real, measurable, disruptive, painful consequences for the average Joe and small businesses, when not "smoothed" and addressed by a government authority. Even Milton Friedman an icon of capitalism, wanted the government to pay the poor a type of "UBI" or universal basic income:
I believe a UBI will make everyone poor and lazy. I would rather have the government provide all Americans with an employment guarantee in the public sector than hand everyone a welfare check. Whenever you see billionaires supporting a UBI, be careful:
They see the writing on the wall for market capitalism, due to advanced automation and artificial intelligence, and know that the alternative to high unemployment and the eventual collapse of markets is to create an artificial market supported by a government income, a.k.a. UBI. The capitalist system must be maintained at all costs for them to remain the ruling, wealthy elites and masters of the means of production. The specter of adopting a non-profit system of production, employing advanced technology, scares the bejesus out of them, because it renders them equal to everyone else. They lose their important social class status as the lords of production.
The pearl-clutching arguments against the government's role in handling the accounting and logistics of production in the future high-tech, automated economy, are designed to make people fearful that the USSR and Stalin will resurrect from the dead, due to such a system.
They pretend that we can't have a democratic government that also rationally, centrally plans a highly automated, autonomously driven economy in collaboration with worker-owned and democratically run enterprises.
Yes we can and eventually, we're going to have to do it, to survive. The alternative is a type of "techno-feudalism" where the wealthy capitalist elites own all of the robots and the vast majority of people become worthless and consigned to the compost heap.
To avoid a Soylent Green scenario, we must organize production at a national scale, to meet all of our needs, employing robots and artificial intelligence, which will be owned by everyone, collectively, and managed by our government (local, state, and federal). A democratic, constitutional republican government is simply a social apparatus organized by the people to manage their large-scale socioeconomic, civil affairs, and projects. It's not inherently good, nor is it inherently evil, it's whatever we want it to be. We're not Soviet Russia we're the United States of America, so our form of "socialism" will be fully democratic and all of our nation's hillbillies can keep their guns, beer, and chewing tobacco.
We can use the government as a production management and logistics tool, to get those robots working and producing all of the goods and services that we use. Extracting raw materials from mines, processing those raw materials, transporting them to the factories, and manufacturing and delivering all of the goods that we consume.
We work 20 hours weekly supervising the system, maybe, most likely also doing some work ourselves
(including some labor intensive work as well in some situations), and in return, we get EVERYTHING., House, land for our personal garden, plenty of food, all of the current electronics that we currently use, like our smartphones, computers, radios..etc. We get access to all of the products and services that we currently rely on and love. With advanced automation and artificial intelligence, we can eliminate poverty in America.
We'll have even more toys, living in a world of extreme abundance due to the fact that robots don't rest or need food.
An intelligent, autonomous machine that doesn't need a human worker to operate it, works 24/7, mining, processing, transporting, manufacturing, storing, inventorying, accounting, delivering, "customer service", you name it.
We will still work, but we will have a lot more stuff and time to do the things that imbue our lives with meaning and happiness. We will spend more quality time with our families and friends, engaging in activities that we consider enjoyable and rewarding. That's the high-tech world that we can create, provided the capitalist masters and their cronies don't get in the way and attempt to essentially take private control of all of the robots and AI, rendering everyone worthless and in route to the grave through pandemics, crime, drugs, incarceration, wars..etc.
Sure, they'll send us a UBI, while they're planning to eliminate us. We become a threat to their wealth and power if we're no longer employable (useful to them).
Ironically, the current capitalist elites will be the ones who adopt high-tech, democratic communism. They will get rid of us, the working class, who once had value to them when they needed us to work their capitalist "plantation", but no longer see us as a valuable asset or commodity to be purchased in a labor market or as their customers, handing them our wages, when we buy their products. I know this might sound crazy...
But it's nonetheless true. In order to avoid the "tech-apocalypse", with all of its painful, catastrophic consequences, we must begin, gradually transitioning our economy to a non-profit, high-tech, mostly automated, centrally planned system of production. It might take a few decades, but the sooner we do it the better.
www.youtube.com
www.youtube.com
www.irs.gov
finance.yahoo.com
What happened? Back to socialist top down destruction of opportunity and the right to own our property.
