Toward a Consensual Working Model

If the average American income is being reduced by lower pay, declining asset values, and higher prices for food and fuel, it is absolutely imperative to reduce the tax burden for the average-income class.

It is essential we increase the income of average Americans if we want to emerge from this persistent, recessionary trend. Increasing the income of upper-class Americans, despite Republican rhetoric, does not, will not, increase income for everyone else. If recession (declining demand and rising debt) is what you want, tax cuts for the rich will surely get you there.

Empirically, we see the rich getting richer at the expense of everyone else. The effect is a high demand for government spending while revenues are declining because, philosophically, in spite of the evidence, we must have tax cuts for the rich to increase income and reduce the demand for government debt (which is one of the more dogmatically mind-numbing tautologies of Republican logic and rhetoric to validate otherwise disconfirmed hypotheses).

Empirically tested, the tax policy we have now will keep us in a recessionary trend. The policy is so detrimental--the wealth is so accumulated--that even a massive, government stimulus plan did not pull us out. If we want to reverse this trend, it is necessary to reverse the "effective" tax policy: progressively higher rates toward the upper margin and lower rates toward the lower margin with the nominal rate being the "real" rate collected with no exemptions, deductions, or subsidies.

Increasing income toward the lower margin reduces the need for government spending. If we want to reduce spending, this is the way to do it without causing an even more massive rate of unemployment. Remember, unemployment produces a massive, systemic benefit for the rich. Your job and your assets are liquidated and sold back to you with money you borrow from them at a high rate because you are--by deliberate, systemic determination--a bad credit risk. Equity is effectively turned into debt, and if you are not the beneficiary of the lower, marginal tax rate, which includes tax-incentives to even have a job that you pay through the public bonding authority, you suffer even more to make the rich even richer. By all accounts, empirically, despite what Republicans preach, tax-incentive programs for the rich are not Pareto Optimal because your loss is their gain.

The Republican agenda calls for both spending cuts and tax cuts at the high margin, which is deflationary. It will increase the need for government spending while revenue is declining (like we have now), so it cannot be considered a serious plan for debt reduction despite being declared "The Path to Prosperity."

Since the average-income class is the vast majority, Constitutionally endowed with the power of popular consent, how come there is not a clear and decisive consensus to confirm its self-interest with the force and legitimacy of public authority?

The reason we do not have a clear, political consensus is because, as described and explained in previous articles, there is a complex conflation of political philosophy combined with technical theory and practice. These elements combine to form a complex working model, and while it may appear impossible, modifying it toward a clear and decisive, middle-class consensus is not really that difficult. It appears to be impossible because, for example, when Democrats gained a majority and captured the executive as the Great Recession transpired, the first thing they did was raise taxes to finance healthcare and dickered with an unfathomable healthcare plan while Americans lost their jobs, their incomes, their homes.... Democrats literally fiddled while Rome burned!

Following all the economic fiddle-faddle, political folderol, and garishly self-aggrandized gamesmanship, voters had enough. The vote effectively de-selected the conceit that a select few should mandate what consumers are going to buy at a government-negotiated, economy-of-scale price which, empirically, by past experience, means we do business with firms because we have to, not because we want to, at a no-bid price we have to pay because we can't say no!

Democrats came up with a healthcare plan that is ripe for expensive corruption and abuse because it is effectively non-consensual (by mandate) and, thus, inherently unempirical (unaccountable). It is a plan that needs to be de-selected because it represents a largely non-consensual working (Hamiltonian) model despite all the legitimate, democratic process associated with it. Hence, voters elected a counter-party presence conflated with the element of a third-party accountability because Hamiltonian modeling has driven us to the point of uncontrollable debt in an unrelenting crisis proportion!

People can't buy healthcare because of insufficient funds...and mandating they buy it, despite all the technical mumbo-jumbo, is not the solution to this problem! So, when Republicans assumed the majority position, they summarily lost their counter-party mandate to de-select the healthcare bill and went right to validating what keeps us from affording to buy healthcare at any price--insufficient income! According to the new, Republican majority, its mandate is to ensure tax cuts for the rich and cut welfare which, on the heels of the Great Recession, will turn the recession into a full-blown depression!

I do believe "The People" have had enough, and so it will be up to the technocrats to keep us from gravitating toward a more consensual, working model.

Much of what prevents consensus is its being mired in abstract, technical analyses promulgated by a bureaucratic, administrative elite that average Americans cannot verify or disconfirm with a popular vote. This working, administrative, bureaucratic model has a more elitist than a pluralist aspect, and so it tends to produce elitist benefits validated, rather than pluralistically verified, with the force and legitimacy of state authority (See the article, "The Bureaucratic Model of Power and Political-Economy" on this web site).

Sociologists tell us that a bureaucracy is an organization structured for stable, routine tasks. When we have high inflation, for example, the Fed routinely raises interest rates to reduce it. The bureaucratic effect is equally stable and routine--it produces a predictable, structurally reliable result that we all bank on. Why, then, is there so much uncertainty and all that systemic risk (angst) associated with our inherent, economic existence? It would seem, then, that the risk is not an unavoidable ontology, but is structurally (purposefully or, that is, teleologically rather than ontologically) engineered to operate with predictable, bureaucratic, reliability. Technically, it is both.

While risk is structurally teleological, it has an ontological dimension, nevertheless, which I refer to as the "gamma" risk proportion. No matter how hard we try to avoid it, the risk will always present with real, empirical value representing the ontology (the categorical imperative) of a teleological, and needlessly angst-driven existence (being that we are more than economic animals). Since we are endowed with moral intelligence, we have the freedom to choose whether we model risk into a diffused, pluralistic, non-catastrophic proportion, or not.

The risk, remember, cannot be avoided. It is always there, ontologically (it does not care how we perceive it or how we structure it, it just "categorically" is what it is, and it is up to us to choose what is "imperative"). While it cannot be avoided, it can be allowed to accumulate in order to be structurally managed into a predictable, reliable distribution, like when we experience massive unemployment and massive transformation of equity into debt (a huge public debt to be managed by our "prudential regulators" or the bureaucracy). This, of course, results in an alienated complexity (and anxiety) that appeals to authority with less and less accountability--it becomes a working model that is progressively more authoritarian and less verifiably consensual.

The trend to establish an evermore authoritarian state is a trend that can, nevertheless, be reversed; and contrary to what Republicans want, it does not require deconstructing regulatory authority but operationalizing it to fit a more pluralistic, working model.

Clever economic and political manipulations to gain value by causing detriment is not the measure of sophistication. Causing the Great Recession and then telling baby boomers they are an unaffordable liability is the height of arrogant stupidity. Growing old is not a liability we cannot afford, but an asset in which to distribute accumulated wealth into sustainable, post-industrial, economic growth; and if you are too greedy to see that, you are philosophically determined to the unavoidable risk...an economic animal unwittingly snared in the detriment of his own devices.

The purpose of life, we come to find out, is to always do the right thing and be creative about it...not to do the wrong thing and innovate clever structures to get away with it as a confirmative demonstration of power.