by pup55 » Sat 10 Sep 2011, 19:39:46
Where was I:
First of all, I, your ruler occasionally make a typo, and if I do you are commanded to ignore it, as if I had no clothing on....
Oh, yeah, we still have some work to do.
Keep in mind that social security, medicare and the military are the three previously untouchable parts of the budget, and we have radically restructured them, we can now start on some fundamental changes to fix the productive economy so that it becomes an economic engine again.
6. Corporate Governance; Per the above rant the current system we have in corporate government is in failure mode. Here is how it works: The Baby Boomers have $15T in mutual funds, run by mutual fund managers. These guys control vast amounts of money and invest in large fractions of our largest corporations, and as such they occupy powerful positions on the boards of directors who choose the CEO's. The CEO's look around for ways to make the stock price higher, which favors both the fund and the CEO whose pay is based on that, and the first thing they do is fire as many baby boomers as possible, because that's where all of the overhead is. Does that make sense? What they should be doing is looking for new technology to do what they do, modernizing their plants, like the Germans and Japanese do, and look for new markets to sell their stuff..
So, the first thing we are going to do is restrict the ownership of US corporations to no more than 40% institutional investors, and other owners that will insulate the officers from the stakeholders. This will mean that shareholder uprisings will be common, bosses will be fired regularly, and they will be replaced by people that know the business with some known abiltiy to manage something.
Secondly, in order to do business in the US, we're going to have to require that companies like Toyota open up their company to international ownership , just like we do. Right now, as you know, there are restrictions against too big of a foreign ownership of some of these companies, and so we will either return the favor, as it applies to US-based companies, or insist that the home countries allow foreign control over their companies like we do ours. Seems only fair. What is happening now is, we're assembling the cars, but not designing them, and we're not seeing the profits. Those go to the head office in Japan. We have to get some reciprocation.
Thirdly, taking your corporate office over to Bermuda to avoid US taxes and regulations it is your choice but if you do it, you're going to have to pay double the US tax rate to do so. Same goes with moving jobs to China or elsewhere.
I think the above will pretty much fix the serious underlying problem, which is the mutual fund managers and officers looting the treasury of these companies instead of making them grow, but if it doesn't, we can always pass a law that limits the CEO and director pay of these outfits to some multiple of the lowest paid employee equal to that currently found in Germany, and those that do not comply are taxed to make up the difference.
A well-run company that works in the favor of its stockholders and employees and community stakeholders will not be affected by this in the slightest. Companies that are run to enrich the directors and managers will have some growing pains, but if you want some access to the US markets, you are going to have to allow us to play by the same rules as the rest of the world...
Rick Perry won't like it.
7. Taxes. Per the above the situation is a mess, any attempt in the recent past to fix it have only resulted in another doubling of the size of the tax code, and an entire industry has developed to avoid taxes and/or influence legislation for subsidies of one type or another.
it is clear we can no longer afford that nonsense. So, from now on we're taxing the top line, with the few exceptions noted above for irresponsible corporations who want to participate in our markets. No corporate incentives for anything.
We're going to take the GDP, figure out how much it takes to run the government, minus the changes we made above, and tax the top line by that amount. No accountants, no lawyers, no nothing. Same with individuals, except that we're going to institute a graduated system by which the more prosperous of us, who have benefited from the system thus far, will do their patriotic duty as good Americans and pay a little higher percentage, which they should be happy to do, since they were lucky enough to be able to reap the system's benefits.
We should not have a situation where Warren Buffet's secretary pays more in taxes than he does, and we are beyond the point of tweaking.
Sorry again, Rick.
8. Workforce Quality: Is it not clear that the US K-12 system is anachronistic, teaches kids the wrong lessons or no lessons, and basically amounts to a series of monuments to the good old boy football coaches that lose between 1/3 and 1/2 of the students? And, because of idiocy such as NCLB and so-called accountability there is enormous incentive to teach the test and cheat? And is it clear that the most predictive measurement of a school's quality is the zip code, that is, who the parents are?
Well, we have to pull the plug. In no other system in the country would we tolerate a 33 percent defect rate.
For the so-called college bound, let the system be kind of like it is, and I am not talking about the jocks here, I am talking about the top third of the class, who are probably going to succeed no matter what system. For the rest of the numbskulls, there are going to be plenty of ways to shunt them off into trades, work skills, and other activities that do not require the higher level of education.
I happen to think there is a vast untapped resource in the middle aged former corporate types, to the point if there was some way to weed out the discipline problems, and empower the teachers like they used to be, and letting these people be teachers, you'd end up with a much better system than today, which is full of squishy 22 year old grads who get pushed around. I can even envision a system where a teacher takes a handful of students, they pay him or her more or less directly, and over time, and he or she gets them through the system to the point where they get into college in some other means than graduation. There are plenty of options.
The parents are going to whine, because they assume that little johnny is college bound and he is just immature etc. but at some point in the day, they too have to be levelled with. Might this be discriminatory and possibly politically incorrect? Yeah, baby, but it is once again facing up to reality rather than tap dancing around the central question, which is, is it a right, or a priveledge, to be given an education.
9. Drugs. Turn the whole thing over to the Miller Brewing Company, which has a distribution network, in conjunction with the Monsanto company, which has all of the genetic engineering capabilities they need, and within a short period of time, the illegal drug trade would be controlled, regulated so that the kids do not get to that stuff, and taxed as a source of revenue for the treatment of abusers, and so cheap as to make it impractical to smuggle across the border.
The prisons are empty, the mexican drug war goes bankrupt, the police concentrate on enforcing the intoxicated driving laws for the brief time it takes to get it under control after we throw the book at the users, another idiotic chapter in American history is over.
10. Real Estate: You know, don't you, that this catastrophe is still in progress, prices are spiralling down because there are no buyers in the system, and no one, including the commercial real estate people, knows what anything is worth.
And, you know, don't you, that there will be no business formation, no investments, and no squat until the public confidence is restored in the value of the house they live in, if any.
And you know that a substantial portion of the US economy is completely paralyzed right now because of this deflationary spiral?
I am working on a "real estate holiday" plan, which is similar to FDR's bank holiday, by which the people that walked away from their mortgages get some kind of relief but are still expected to pay something back to the system, the people that were responsible but hurt in the meltdown get rewarded for their responsibility, the people that were really good and lived within their means and paid their place off have a chance to benefit by investing in some of the places down the block, and the people with money that want to should be able to take over some of the assets, with assistance from the government in finding tenants or moving in themselves, and the excess inventory when this is all over can be bulldozed and/or recycled.
The banks get the feces off of their books, the people with discipline are rewarded, the people that had to walk away get relief but are still expected to pay something back, and there is no excess inventory...
Oh, by the way, anybody who was determined to have sold a fradulent mortgage in the 2005-2008 time frame, anyone who bundled them and sold them as AAA and the officers of the ratings agencies themselves, can take the place of the drug users in all of those empty jail cells.
Once all of this is done, we start the "Energy Efficient Home" program. A government financed crew will come to your house, tear out all of your non energy efficient windows, appliances and everything else, and replace it with the energy efficient model. This crew will consist of former construction workers and supervisors, hired to be civilian contractors, that were formerly collecting unemployment.
11. Immigration: We have to clear this one thing up before we can work on the actual unemployment issue. Any illegal people still crazy enough to be in the country need to be asked to leave. No ifs, ands or buts. If you have an anchor baby, we might consider readmitting it when it is 18.
Anybody with an H1B visa, see you later. This includes all of the cousins, sisters, uncles and aunts that came in with you on your coat tails that are now running the nations nail salons. We cannot take care of our own.
Anybody with a green card that is now unemployed, see ya. We are not paying nationals of some foreign land money to be unemployed as long as there are US workers available to fill jobs.
p.s. I do not buy for one minute that 'Americans won't do those jobs" argument. After a couple of years in the pup55 boot camp, and some assurance that they will get a decent wage, we will become a hard working nation again that cleans up its own damn garbage, and pours its own concrete.
12. Public Assistance: The incentive system is all screwed up on this, and here is what I mean. In most systems in sane places, if there is a failure, the root cause of the failure is addressed. So the popping out of a baby by an underage mother is a failure, but in this nation, there are no negative incentives for having multiple of them, particularly since a lot of these people get ongoing assistance from the taxpayer. The root cause is not addressed.
So, here is the rule: If you have to get assistance from the government to take care of your child, you have to agree not to have any more kids, and to get some assurances of this, you will have to have some IUD or other device implanted in you to prevent this from happening until such time as you can support them. If you are a young gentleman who has fathered a number of these kids, the same thing applies to you.
Is this interference in reproductive rights? You bet it is. By becoming the parent of a kid that you cannot support, and getting assistance from the taxpayers to raise it, the taxpayers deserve the opportunity to eliminate the root cause of the problem, and "just say no" is not the answer, as Sarah Palin has amply demonstrated.
PS: Popping out a brat does not get you out of your 2-year hookup with the military. In fact, a special unit is created just for you and dad.
13. Now, we're ready to solve the problem: The unemployment issue. Anybody still left in the country not working after all of this, after the military thing, after the barefoot doctors and other infrastructure, after the training of some of these people to be teachers, the energy crew, and everything else, along with the exit of the foreign workers, we give additional training, with the focus on energy efficiency, relocalized small scale agriculture (no more 1200 mile salads) and other restructuring of society that will happen because of $8.50 gas, including the development and building of more fuel efficient vehicles, and making our communities more walkable.
We encourage business formation in these activities by supervised grants, an extension service, just like the old timey county extension service that used to help farmers but oriented toward business, and we move forward in that direction.
We pay unemployment compensation for as long as we need to. To incentivize these people, we encourage them to stay healty, stay off the cheap drugs, and toe the line crime-wise, using various carrots and sticks at our disposal.
There will be a renaissance in the country once the retooling is underway. Energy efficient vehicles (developed and built in the USA by US workers with the profits going to US stockholders, localized living, mass transportation, and a recycling renaissance, as we get rid of the old stuff, and all of this with a solid financial system and corporate system built to compete globally over the long run, with any economy on earth.
That gets us off to a good start.
Might have to tweak the system later.
