Prometheus 6

Ted Halstead of the New America Foundation has a few ideas he'd like considered. My jaded perceptions follow.

Every baby a trust-fund baby. Just as the nation broadened the ownership of land in the 19th century through the Homestead Act, and of houses in the 20th century through the mortgage interest tax deduction, expanding the ownership of financial assets should be the cause of the 21st century. British Prime Minister Tony Blair set the example by championing a law that endows every British newborn with financial assets from birth. We should follow suit and inaugurate a new era of universal capitalism in the United States.

"A new era of universal capitalism" Doesn't that send little shivers down your spine?

A nice concept in isolation, but if the rules of the game are the same throwing money at it is like throwing alcohol at an open flame.

Universal coverage for universal responsibility. Why not approach health insurance like car insurance by making it mandatory? Coupled with public subsidies for those who need them, mandatory insurance could cover all 43 million uninsured Americans and lower the cost of coverage for those who are insured (by broadening the risk pool to include the young and healthy, the 18- to 34-year-olds who are the most likely to be uninsured), all while costing the government less than Kerry's plan, which is said to reach 27 million uninsured.

HEY! HOW ABOUT A NICE, SINGLE-PAYER SYETEM?

It really is the simplest way to get as close to everone as possible covered.

Tax consumption, not work. You would never know it by listening to politicians, but more than 70% of American families pay more in payroll taxes than in any other tax. Yet no other tax does more to retard job creation or to reduce take-home pay, especially among low-income workers. By eliminating the payroll tax and replacing it with a progressive national consumption tax, we could create a lot more jobs and generate a lot more savings — thereby solving our two greatest economic problems at once.

Consumption tax = sales tax, right?

Here's a nice simple explanation of why that's a horrible idea.

End all farm subsidies. Our farm subsidies are vestiges of the past. They harm farmers and the environment, create agricultural gluts, retard global free trade, hurt Third World countries and cost taxpayers $20 billion a year. By ending these subsidies, we could not only alleviate these various problems but free up the resources to, say, endow every child from birth with financial assets. While we're at it, let's end all forms of corporate welfare, which would free up an additional $50 billion for better uses.

Okay, you got one in.

Family-friendly workplaces. Although the traditional family is no longer the norm, our workplaces have yet to adapt, penalizing those who need flexibility to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities, often by depriving them of good jobs and basic benefits. This two-tier labor market should be ended by making basic benefits citizen-based instead of employer-based and by giving all workers the flexibility of today's part-time workers, along with the benefit security of full-time workers.

This is a deep one. We live differently than folks did when all our expectations were set up. The two car family has given way to the two income family and the repercussions of that are legion. The way the economy has developed, two incomes are necessary so the answer isn't as simple as getting all the wives to stay at home. Many folks are concerned that their babysitter has more experience with their children than they do.

The single parent, whether due to divorce, separation or whatever, has that much more difficult a situation to deal with.

Something needs to be done, and if you strip things to bare bones there are only two options: build institutions that share the child care burdens or lighten the load on families. Both of the options would involve extensive social engineering and I don't think we have the national will to lighten the load on families. It would mean doing things like making sure only one salary is needed to support a family, for instance.

Right now folks are kind of sliding sideways into providing institutions to share the burden…or they were. It was budding off from public education, the after school centers and whatnot. They are the first things to go when money gets tight.

Family-friendly workplaces represent another option, but if you think you hear howls about mandating health coverage for your workers, just wait until the insurance companies tell folks how much more coverage will cost when you got babies all laying about.

And I haven't spoken about the "right" thing to do because I am liberated from such duties, thankyouverymuch. But it's surely an issue we need to deal with because we raise an unprepared generation and we'll see another Bush (or a reasonable facsimile) in office before I die. I don't think my heart could take that.

A race to energy independence. It is a cliche that the United States should pursue energy independence with the same vigor that once fueled its race to space. Yet we lack a viable plan to light this new fire. The answer may lie in another recent revolution — the biotech one — in which a competition between private industry and a public consortium greatly accelerated the mapping of the human genome. Why not apply a similar model to energy efficiency by funding a high-profile contest between public and private parties?

I wonder how many dinosaurs it takes to make a gallon of gasoline?

I think we're out of dinosaurs, And cold fusion looks pretty unlikely.

You know what makes petroleum based fuels the cheapest around? The distribution system is already in place. That's also what makes it harder than hell to get another system started. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the current thing going, or at least in a smooth transition. A smooth transition requires buy-ins from all the current players.

Building a global middle class. At a time of a ballooning trade deficit and global overcapacity, the U.S. needs other countries to consume more and to export less. The best way to accomplish both is by exporting the middle-class development model (such as 30-year mortgages) that created mass affluence in our own nation half a century ago. By recasting the globalization debate around the overarching goal of building a global middle class, we could promote prosperity and stability at home and abroad

Can we be a little less ambitious? How about a national middle class?

Seriously, though, this one he's just talking out his hat. Before you can issue those 30 year mortgages, you have to know who owns what. You have to have regulations and basically honest enforcement…predictable enforcement is more like it.

Now, most of the places you'd think of at this point used to have exactly that. It seems feudal systems are pretty much the norm when human clumps exceed a certain size. Europe evolved capital, though, which is sort of weird if you really think about it. Capital is more notes about a thing than the thing itself…if anything qualifies as evidence of things unseen it's profits on paper. But all the mechanisms underlying European markets, which includes a significant amount of European culture, are necessary to support ownership in a Western sense. And we don't even seem to be aware of exactly what those mechanisms are. When we tell "developing" nations they must open their markets, we'll like a bat explaining to a mouse, "It's easy to fly, just jump off the building and…"