Path to Prosperity for US All

a comprehensive initiative to bring thorough political economic reform to the United States

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Imagine a comprehensive set of reforms that can bring:

  • economic recovery; 
  • widespread grassroots democracy; 
  • overnight freedom from debt for virtually every family;
  • a nearly debt free federal government;
  • increased rewards for innovation, ingenuity and hard work; 
  • an end to the abuses of concentrated corporate power running rampant throughout our economy and inevitably corrupting our governments;
  • conditions for lower taxes, more governmental services, and yet with balanced budgets at every level of government;
  • better stewardship and management of our precious natural resources, and 
  • solvency to not only Social Security, but also our struggling employer-based defined benefit pension plans and the other private pension mechanisms too.

Sounds too good to be true? However, that is precisely what the Path to Prosperity for US All Initiative (P2P4USA) will do. And it is not merely to provide these benefits to rouse popular support. These benefits actually arise from taking the right steps – even the necessary steps – from both an economic and a constitutional perspective. To have a viable republican form of government requires we end the undue claims on the fruits of others’ labors: to end this taxation of labor without representation.

P2P4USA proposes to re-found the power of government as a power of the people: a power of the polis. The proposed mechanism for this is a US Constitutional amendments to establish a one-time progressive net worth tax to equitably end ownership in natural resource assets and publicly chartered corporations and to eliminate their associated unearned income claims. The one-time tax also funds repayment and forgiveness of all household and privately held federal debt as a one-time debt forgiveness jubilee. This initiative also proposes the repayment of some portion of corporate, non-corporate business, state government, and local government debts and to restore home ownership for those who lost their homes since the 2008 housing mortgage crisis. Finally, the initiative secures and duly prioritizes the incomes of retirees and the disabled who are truly in need of unearned income above all other unearned income claims.

The transition is accomplished through:

  1. Amending the US Constitution to ensure government serves the needs of all in an equitable manner and not merely the privileged few (see the draft amendment language).
  2. Enacting supporting legislation at the federal, state, and local levels and enacting policies within government chartered enterprises to achieve the aims of the initiative and new federal requirements of all government chartered entities.
  3. Chartering new local units of government to empower the people to become active citizen participants in their own affairs including federal and state chartered metropolitan government that defragments legislative power at the local level.
  4. Securing the needs of senior retirees and others in need to live with dignity through a comprehensive reform and expansion of Social Security. We thus propose we resolve the crisis in Social Security and private pension systems by expanding our way out of the crisis and not surrendering to the crisis.
  5. Ending the graft involved in allowing the private accrual of monopoly economic rents from natural resources so that such rents benefit public treasuries only and thus reduce our current tax burdens.
  6. Restoring home ownership to those who lost their homes since the 2007 housing financial crisis, due to the extreme malfeasance of Wall Street.
  7. Providing comprehensive debt forgiveness to reset the economy and place us all on a solid and equitable economic and political foundation.
  8. Strengthening federal service to states, local communities, and the people through uniform reporting requirements from government, government chartered entities, along with transparent, accountable, and equitable federal oversight of all public elections (see the discussion of Federal hierarchy versus feudal hierarchy).

While we might potentially think of this initiative as merely placing the interpretation of the US Constitution back on track as the framers of the Constitution imagined, the benefits of doing so are many. This initiative:

  1. Eliminates most of our national debt and most household debts as well.
  2. Eliminates the conditions for the wildly perverse distribution of income, wealth and political power, while strengthening productivity along with ensuring greater inducements and rewards for hard work and ingenuity.
  3. Eliminating the wildly perverse distribution of income, also eliminates the need for persistent debt as our only engine of economic activity.
  4. Eliminating the wildly perverse distribution of income and wealth also creates an automatic economic stimulus without any merely token government expenditures.
  5. Eliminates the wildly perverse distribution of income, wealth, and lobbying power which are incompatible with our Constitutional republic.
  6. Restores the natural resource basis of taxes afforded prior feudal governments to our constitutional republic government so that we pay only taxes and rents for the general welfare and not for the corrupt and lavish personal consumption of an economically wasteful rentier class.
  7. Reducing economic rents for primary residences means that modest living with a low ecological footprint is duly rewarded rather than forcing compact urban dwellers to pay punitive and speculative real estate premiums for such living.
  8. Eliminates the adversarial work relations created within today’s government chartered enterprises by demanding that the requirements of republican governance in government proper be extended to all government chartered entities as well.
  9. Creates the immediate conditions for a balanced federal budget without a harmful decline in economic activity.
  10. Fundamentally addresses the problems created by the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. FEC decision and other prior decisions that created a privileged guarantee of free speech for government chartered entities over natural persons by not only Constitutionally prohibiting campaign expenditures from corporate treasuries but also ending the concentration of corporate power and control exercised through interlocking and plutocratic directorates; instead placing the proprietorship and entrepreneurial directorship of all government chartered enterprises firmly in the hands of its own polis: its workers.
  11. By establishing republican governmental forms with regard to natural resources and other monopoly resources we allow such foundational and otherwise monopoly dominated markets to operate in a utilitarian manner with thorough transparency, due process, and equal access to all. This utilitarian operation thus eliminates the monopoly privilege that constrains all interconnected markets and therefore allows competition to flourish throughout all other connected markets.
  12. Greatly decentralizes governmental power by both empowering local communities to steward the resources important to their own decentralized community and reconfiguring federal government and other superordinate jurisdictions as federalist jurisdictions servicing those communities while simultaneously involving the grassroots of the electorate in their own legislative processes, thus improving our electoral skills as a polis.