Buffett resets the goal.

My spirits soared the day billionaire Warren Buffett made a statement destined to rock the world of the super rich and just-plain-rich. He said he and others like him should be taxed to pay their share of running this country. It rocketed me to a new high because Buffett is one of the richest humans on the planet. He's at the top of the pyramid.

“OUR leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’ But when they did the asking, they spared me,” he said. Did I read that right or am I hallucinating?  Buffett continued, “I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. These blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species.” Pure Buffett.

“If you make money with money,” he continued, “as some of my super-rich friends do, your [tax] percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.”

Last year about 80 percent of tax revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. Buffett noted, “The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot. “People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.”

 “I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people, said Buffett. “They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.” Then he commented on the twelve members of Congress who soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. “They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.

“This poor and the middle class…need every break they can get,” Buffett pointed out. Can you believe that, from a multi billionaire? Was ever there a more socially and emotionally balanced human being? Buffett gets it.

The universe doesn’t play games. Everything in it must balance or is doomed to extinction. Volcanoes erupt to re-acquire equilibrium. They must. Earthquakes shake themselves to equilibrium. They must. Tidal waves crash to regain balance. They must. Our entire universe is a system of balanced energies. Humans are part of that.

“My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice, Buffett announced. WOW.

Here’s the bottom line. There is no economically sensible (balanced) or politically honest way to address the deficit without also increasing revenues and reforming the tax code.

The Bush tax cuts are the major reason the country is in the financial shape it’s in. In a the recent debt fight Republicans held unemployment benefits and other measures hostage. Letting the cuts expire at the end of 2012 would save $3.8 trillion over the next decade. That would make a real dent in the $2.4 trillion in total deficit reduction in the debt limit deal.

A sensible and fair approach would be to let the high-end tax cuts expire as scheduled, but keep the other tax cuts for another year. That would keep more cash in the hands of people most likely to spend it and prop up consumer demand while the economy is weak. It would give Congress and the administration time to undertake real tax reform. Any reform must streamline the code, make it fairer and — most important — raise more revenue. The challenge is how does Congress, comprised of 231 millionaires and billionaires, undertake tax reform? Is the fox really the one to decide how the chickens fare in the coop? There’s only one logical answer: public referendum.

Right now, wealthier taxpayers get the greatest benefit. They put forward the proposition that without them everyone else would live in poverty because they create jobs. That has to be the most out-of-balance mathematical equation ever hypothesized in the history of mankind. By definition every equation has to balance, so it follows that without workers the business entity would evaporate, no matter how world-changing one’s entrepreneurial idea is.  Let’s get real, get rid of the euphemisms, and call this what it is: a modern day caste system.

The process needs to be reformed so that help flows to those who most need it: low- and middle-income taxpayers, the people who, in the final analysis, pay for everything. To work properly America’s debt-driven financial system demands that. But any economic system has to work for everyone or it dies of top-heaviness. The equation needs rebalancing so it doesn’t implode from its own inequality. The rebalancing needs to begin with health care for all Americans that’s the equivalent of what Congress gives itself. That is the most basic of requirements in any society of humans. Imagine a super wealthy person suddenly losing it all and finding himself on the street? Can you guess what his politics might change to at that point? Controlling the outrageous perks Congress has given to corporations moving their employment and their profits overseas is a must.

Tax breaks that have outlived their purpose must be ended, starting with subsidies for the oil industry, which is making billions in profits. And financial firms, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and communications, and energy suppliers. The revenue from such reforms could pay down the deficit and allow all tax rates to be lowered, improving incentives to work. Reasonable profits are fine. Reasonable executive compensation is fine. Both are not fine once they pass from fine into creation of serfdom for the rest.

One more thing. Listening to the babble in Washington forces one to the realization that the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.  Two opposing truths can exist simultaneously in the same space. Neither negates the other but complements the other to create synergistic, heartier abundance for all. We know this to be true: some will hear, but not listen; some will listen, but not understand; and, some will understand, but not act. Washington needs consensus, not divergence and conflict.

Many  of us tend to suffer from ‘agenda anxiety’ and ego-itis, the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they want to say to us. Acknowledging that is the first step in repairing the damages the conflict has brought upon you. Everyone can see you anyway, why not admit what everyone is seeing? Self-truth and truth with others about where one has fallen short almost ensures that you will go a long way. Admit your ‘weaknesses’ and watch them morph into your greatest strengths.

Life is simple. If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need condemnation to slow him down or motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around. We all have that responsibility, especially those who have benefited from superb breaks in life for whatever reason.

Warren Buffett has set the bar for himself and for the fortunate others who are super rich.            

Dick Rozek

Portsmouth, NH

October 30, 2011

  

Why are we looking for jobs when we sent them to China?

After centuries of isolation, China has grown massive in power and industrial strength because it opened itself to the world. The Chinese are beating us at our own game. Theirs is an avowed communist country excelling in capitalism. It allows its industries and society to borrow from and compete against the world's best. It approves ongoing modernization of its economic structures. Its leaders understand that this ‘openness’ is key to China's success.  

"Flying from the stunningly modern Beijing airport to the Newark airport now is like flying from Paris to Burkina Faso," says one business traveler. "There's a different spirit in China. They have a market of a billion people who are so extraordinarily energized in the way we haven't been since the fifties."  

We, on the other hand, appear to be withering on the vine. Most sowing and nurturing underway now in America is done by corporations and special interests which push the individual aside in the name of obscene profits and outrageous executive pay. Sadly, its blurred vision has allowed our highest court to see corporations and special interests as “persons,” relative to campaign contributions. The court opened the floodgates for big money to control ever more, including now our elections. The court thus strangles individual Americans. That is not equality. It is grossly unequal. We’re about to harvest what we’ve planted. Under the charade of taking care of Americans, the lunacy of our legislative inflexibility and our judicial astigmatism, have brought us to this point.

For centuries when aristocracy wanted something more it simply burdened the lower economic classes with another tax. Nobility never paid its share. In 2011 America nothing has changed. We are told to be grateful for our mega employers because it is they who employ the rest of us. True, but the other half of the equation is equally true: without employees there is no elite.                                                                                                      

Over the last decade we knowingly gave away our jobs, mostly to China. Now we shout, “where are our jobs?” Duh. Congress gave our corporations incredible tax-breaks when they decided to gift away Americans’ jobs. Corporations demanded, Congress complied.  This administration inherited the problem. The day Obama was inaugurated those who created the problem demanded he fix it. A clever ploy: distract attention by blaming others for national joblessness. In 2010 less than 10 percent of America’s tax burden was paid by corporations and special interest groups, many of which paid zero tax last year thanks to made-to-order legislation. When you give away a nation’s jobs without first having something to replace them you begin dismantling the nation. That was executed not by one individual but mostly by our legislative government. In some areas that could be a treasonable offense.

Everything that is today could not be were it not for that which came before. That doesn’t speak well for where we’re coming from.

In the 21st century our government is trapped in a 20^th century dynamic. You can’t drive forward looking in your rear view mirror. China has been trapped in a centuries old system of society and economics, but now its leaders have seen the light and opened up.  They’ve vaulted out of their old paradigm and appropriated the west’s prodigious manufacturing savvy. We gave it, they’ve got it.

Our wounds are self-inflicted. We have the government we deserve. It’s the old “you reap what you sow’ story. In the coming 2012 election Americans should demand that “I dare you politics” vanishes from America. You get elected. That means you go to Washington obligated to make a better nation, a better world, a better place and life for our children, not to make a lifelong career for yourself with every perk that you continue to reject for the American people. Americans are tired of that disconnect and elitism. And, they’re angry.

It’s easy to talk the right way as a singular politician, but that’s political suicide when you’re speaking for the party. Scripted politics is tired and Americans are tired of it. And, frankly, it’s uninspiring and downright dangerous. The people cry out for leadership but there is none. Scripted politics is not leadership. Congress seems unaware of the mood of the people. There’s a dramatic groundswell building for meaningful transformation. The people are forming their own slightly rebellious parade.

It’s said all politics are local, but in the case of the New Hampshire first-in-the-nation primary, all politics are social. Obama won the presidency with his handlers and supporters understanding how to use the internet to get votes. The loser wondered what happened. Now, with social media every voter is only a keystroke away from believable, immediate personal persuasiveness.

Freedom isn’t worth having if it doesn’t include the freedom to make mistakes. One of the marks of superior people is that they are action oriented. One of the marks of average people is that they are talk oriented. Politicians play their games because they secretly believe they’re smarter and sharper than the rest. Warning: The voters usually prevail. Maybe later than sooner, but they do overcome. Being nudged aside and ignored doesn’t work anymore. That was yesterday. Today clear thinking and action control the day.

 “You can count on Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else,” said Winston Churchill in his droll style of making a point. He was right.

Dick Rozek

Portsmouth, NH

10/07/2011

Finance capital has all the power.

“See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime….With such an accurate description of legalized plunder, we cannot deny the conclusion that most government activities, including ours, are legalized plunder, or for the sake of modernity, legalized theft.”  Those words were penned by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), a French economist and statesman. Has much changed?

 
Bank bailouts have not been reciprocated. Small business loans are very tight. Mortgages are hard to get. Citibank will soon charge $15 to 20 a month ($240 a year) for checking accounts with less than $6,000. Finally, someone’s sticking it to those people with less than $6,000! Who do they think they are? Bank of America is imposing a $5 monthly fee ($60 a year) to debit card holders to use their own money. A strange twist, you say, charging even more to those bank customers whose resources dwindle daily from the interest and penalties already in place. There is no law for or against this. The law is whatever the banks say it is. The banks giveth and the banks taketh away.

The lack of law has been perverted by greed the size of which makes anything before it seem puny. The idea that market forces produce the law is now accepted as truth. Regulation and legislation have been compromised by special interests which sustain political campaigns of politicians, maximizing their chances of re-election. So, the law, or lack of law, seen from this perspective, favors business interests. The hidden message is the law is up for sale, and that this is “natural.” Thus, “the political process is taken captive. The law, or lack of it, has been placed at the disposal of the unscrupulous who, without risk, exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. The law becomes the weapon of every kind of greed. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. Instead of blocking crime, the law itself is guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!

There’s a tendency among people to live and prosper at the expense of others. History bears witness: wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions and executions, slavery, dishonesty in commerce, monopolies, and more. Humans are impelled to satisfy desires with the least possible pain, and since labor is pain in itself, will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. Plunder stops only when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.
                                                                                          
Generally, laws are made by one class of people. Laws require enforcement which usually is entrusted to those who make them. This explains the almost universal perversion of the law. It is easy to understand how law, instead of blocking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by legislators to destroy the rest of the people’s personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This benefits the lawmakers in proportion to the power they hold.                                                                                                                                  There is no greater evil than the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. It would require volumes to describe all of the consequences. Briefly, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. The beneficiaries are spared the shame, danger, and loss of integrity which their acts would otherwise involve. Sometimes the law places the whole legal apparatus at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim, when he defends himself, as a criminal.                                                                                                                                       People who profit from the law will complain resentfully, defending their acquired rights. They claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage their particular industry, that this procedure enriches everyone because the protected industry is able to spend more and to pay higher wages, and so on. Acceptance of these arguments builds legal plunder into a whole system. Starting a decade ago the system was supplemented by canceling jobs here and gifting them overseas. Paying foreign workers less, we were told, would benefit all. Instead, the shift of jobs internationally fattens corporate bottom lines. Prices are up, not down.                                                                                                   

The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich some at the expense of everyone else. No legal plunder is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability. We say the purpose of the law is to have justice reign, but that’s not a completely accurate statement. In this sense, justice is a negative concept. It too often shines upon those with wealth who then ensure that it 'rains' on the little people. It is better stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

          
So, we have a world of debt. Huge financial interests are clearly calling the shots. How is that in alleged democracies and dictatorial regimes alike, financial high rollers are the only ones who count? How is that banks are allowed to loan multiples of dollars that don’t exist? In effect, banks print their own money with nothing to back it up. How is it that through their own greed and stupidity banks demanded and got enormous taxpayer bailouts and then rating services demand that the government balance its national budget? How do the recipients of citizens’ largesse refuse to loan their unreal money to businesses and individuals struggling to move on? Why has no one gone to jail? Why have there been no hearings or investigations? Why is no one making a case of what really happened? Why is there still no regulation of hedge funds? Why is there no maximum wage law (sounds silly, doesn’t it)? Why is there no law requiring that whatever Congress gives itself must also be given to all?

          
The mega banks and financial institutions have been given a monopoly on money. They are a financial oligarchy, government by a controlling few. Finance capital has all the power and there is no way to regulate it. In reality, it is regulating us. None of the perpetrators are in jail. They haven’t even been invited to a hearing. Instead, it is they who demand to be heard. And obeyed.

Dick Rozek, Portsmouth, NH

11/06/2011

Country needs well-informed citizenry

The true colors, red or blue, of each member of Congress, to which much was entrusted and little expected, have manifested themselves on cue and in a manner that surprises no one. Congress has accomplished zero, nothing. Nothing was expected.

There are 249 millionaires in Congress, none of whom can relate to the 99 percent of the population who struggle to make ends meet. Remember a couple of years ago when this new Congress told us they had the solution to the recession? Apparently, they didn't share it with the rest of us. Nor with each other.

The debt supercommittee's deficit-reduction discussions must have taken place in the Capitol gymnasium, where it's likely most major decisions are deliberated prior to public pronouncement. Most purposeful people understand there has to be compromise for any deficit-reduction effort to move forward. Defying the laws of probability, apparently that kind of person doesn't exist in our Congress.

By getting the public to focus on the either-or choice of cutting $1.2 trillion from the budget over 10 years or activating automatic spending cuts of the same amount, Congress has once again been able to detract from its immovability and gamesmanship. It raises the question, does anybody in Congress understand they were elected to put an end to the criminality in that "esteemed" body?

It's the same old game in Washington. The question was whether the supercommittee would compromise on spending cuts or allow automatic reductions to be triggered. It was a no-brainer from the start.

Congress has toyed with the people again, in effect saying, "We don't think you're bright enough to get what's really going on, so we'll just play the same old tired game because it still works." Our representatives must believe they're smarter than the rest of us. That's preposterous, but there is a major difference between them and us: they have access to "insider" information, which gives them monumental advantage.

This situation is why America needs term limits. Our founders designed our Constitution based on their life expectancy. They couldn't have seen that people elected now, living longer and empowered by enormous amounts of money, seize ownership of the political process and make it theirs, sometimes for life.

There's much clamor for returning to constitutional principles, but there's a need to amend that document. Men and women in high places fall prey to self-delusional grandiosity. Modesty is absent in their psyches and vocabularies. Our governing documents should reflect and deal with that frailty. Election to high office doesn't mean an individual is capable of governing, only that he or she understands manipulation of the political process.

Any segment of a population has few who are true leaders, many who follow the leader, and some who must depend on the rest. History is filled with unfortunate examples of leaders who were not great thinkers or humanitarians, but they were good fighters or they had loyal subjects who did the fighting for them. Modern leadership is more demanding.

Morality must take hold of humanity's ongoing evolution. The world is ready. It now has a critical mass of bright, thinking people who see subjugation and financial imprisonment for what they are: serfdom. Hundreds of equality fighters emerge daily into the world scene, and they will not be denied. Killing or imprisoning them only delays the inevitable. Others rise to replace them. No longer can the world's people be contained by a few, with one glaring exception: control of money.

Those who control money and its supply reign supreme. It's an invisible process, staged away from the prying eyes and ears of those who are forced to fork over their money to enrich the money manipulators. People who control money are real, not imaginary. If we don't believe that, then we deserve to be where we are. We don't get to see the concealed backstage financial puppeteers because they are hidden from view. We get to see only the center stage portion of the show, and none of the clandestine and predatory shenanigans behind the backdrop. Often the stage is momentarily darkened, the better to hide what's going on. Visibility would create riots in the streets.

America has fallen victim to its financial, banking and corporate excesses, and greed. Our debt-driven economy has transferred all power to the money people, and they're not about to give up any of it. They believe they deserve it.

We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. Day by day, all of us must grow into a higher level of consciousness. For some, the day is over. For others, it's just beginning.

Dick Rozek is a Portsmouth resident.