Myopic Selfishness of the Wealthy Leads to Constricting Economy

The economic stance in favor today is to give breaks to the wealthy under the expectation that if they have more money, they are more likely to be in a position to invest to make our means of production bigger and better. What the stance is missing is that corporations do lots of marketing studies to figure out how much of what to produce. Guess what the marketing studies look at? *How much the rest of us have to spend!!*

Well if the wealthy have all the money, what is the level of production the corporations will gear up for? Instead of a cornucopia of great goods and services for many, it leads to production of extravagances and luxury goods no regular person would or could waste their money on. In essence, it is economic slavery as the rest of us scurry to try and cover our life costs with ever-shrinking wages.

How much profit does that leave the corporations? They myopically think they make as much profit on the big ticket items for the few as they would have on medium ticket items for us all.

Put (or leave) the money in the average person's pocket and something quite different unfolds. We, having more money, can afford more and better things so we all in fact have a better standard of living. Our spending would confirm (realigned) corporate choices to invest in improved production and to hire more people for more medium ticket items, and as more people are hired there is even more money flowing through the system, leading to even more and better goods and services.

The ironic thing is that an increasingly larger flow of medium ticket goods and services will actually end up producing much larger profits for the corporations, and a more stable economy and society to boot: we would have lower unemployment and poverty, higher tax revenue so lower deficit or even a return to surplus (given away by our short-sighted, selfish Republican "friends"), fewer foreclosed houses, maybe even longer lasting marriages. And if our economy is blossoming instead of shriveling, what does that do to the stature of the US in the eyes of the rest of the world? Perhaps even the terrorists would have to acquiesce that the US is good to its people in ways they claim we have not been.

The last 16 years confirm this. What happened to the economy under Clinton? Under Bush?

QED

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future