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Chapter 15
Issues That Would Be Included in the Demos

We now turn to the specific issues that should be included in the demos. The issues and the discussion presented here are sufficient to give a clear understanding that only the most fundamental and central political-economic issues can be included in the demos and the included issues are interrelated and form a systematic whole. The discussion is limited to only the federal level of government. But keep in mind that similar demoses could and should exist at the state and local levels of government as well, each with its own unique set of issues. With these things in mind, here is a list of the demos issues. Each of these issues will be briefly discussed in the next chapters of this work.

As a nation how much money should we tax ourselves to finance the federal government?
Of the total tax burden, what percentage should be borne by corporations and businesses, what percentage by a personal income tax, and what percentage by a personal inheritance tax?
How should the burden of the corporate and business tax be distributed, that is, how should the tax rate be scaled?
How should the burden of the personal income tax be distributed, that is, how should the tax rate be scaled?
How should the burden of the inheritance tax be distributed, that is, how should the tax rate be scaled?
What percentage of federal tax revenue should go to healthcare, to other entitlements, to the military, and to the remainder of the federal government?
Should the federal government increase the debt or savings it is carrying, keep the debt or savings at the current amount, or reduce the debt or savings it is carrying?
Should the number of hours in the Standard Workweek be increased, kept at the current number, or decreased?
Should the minimum wage be increased, kept at the current amount, or decreased?
Whom do you select to be president of the United States?
Whom do you select to be a senator in the United States Senate?
Whom do you select to be a representative in the House of Representatives?

The first nine issues that would be included in the demos deal primarily with money matters. The first six issues deal with taxation, and the next three issues deal with other money matters. The last three of the twelve demos issues deal with electing the president of the United States, senators, and representatives.

Note the complete absence of all of our complex and subtle religious, philosophical, moral, ethical, and esthetic issues. They would be left to other areas of our government and society. Note also that none of the issues target specific groups of people. The issues are blind, so to speak, with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.

As you will see from later discussion, there is one action the demos would be able to take which could treat businesses or individuals differentially. In distributing the burden of taxation the demos could scale tax rates in such a way that businesses with larger annual gross revenues, people earning larger annual incomes, or people inheriting larger estates would pay taxes at a higher rate than businesses with smaller revenues or people with less income or smaller inheritances. Despite all of the loopholes and evasions created by the unscrupulous few, our society has long embraced as a principle of fairness that the more one has benefitted economically by living, working, and doing business in our nation the larger the tax burden one should bear even to the extent of bearing a higher tax rate. This is called a progressive tax rate.

However, there also exists contrary argument and the proposal of a “flat tax”¹ wherein everyone pays at the same tax rate. The demos issues dealing with the distribution of the tax burden would be constructed in such a way as to allow the demos by its consensus to set a more progressive tax rate or a flatter tax rate.

The first nine issues that would be included in the demos—the numeric or economic issues—are mathematically-based and interrelated. This is not the case for the last three issues, the electoral issues, which deal with the election of the president of the United States and of senators and representatives. The electoral issues will be discussed in a later chapter. Here we will discuss the economic issues.

Why are these nine issues the most important issues in our society to include in the demos? While many other social issues are important to us and certainly have their philosophical and moral implications, these nine issues differ from other moral issues in that they lie at the very heart of our economic relationship with each other. While we have no shortage of other failings in our relationships with each other, 1) we fail most miserably in our economic relationship; 2) our failure in this area has a most profound effect on our society and our lives; and 3) our economic failure lends itself admirably to consensus and resolution within the demos.

Whether coin, paper, or plastic, money is the universal medium used for the valuation and exchange of goods and services in a market economy. Whatever we humans may be in some largest sense, we are also physical beings which participate within the physical world and within society’s world of money. Whatever less tangible ideals, values, and goals one pursues in life, one must, of necessity, come to terms with one’s physical needs and money. Whatever other issues societies must deal with in their economies and governments, they must deal in one manner or another with the distribution of wealth.

In our society wealth is redistributed by means of economic transactions—buying, selling, and trading—of unequal advantage and by the laws, rules, and financial and other activities of government which give economic advantage to one faction of people over others. Of all of the means (such as physical imprisonment and torture, psychological abuse, propaganda, etc.) used by some people to enslave, oppress, and exploit other people, economic means are the most universally practiced.

Capitalism is not only an economic system but a religion. Its true believers and those who merely profess these beliefs for their advantage, proclaim that if only government would leave it alone capitalism would solve all problems. They pretend government to be its enemy, but they cynically and quietly understand that government is a principal instrument of Wealth’s advantage and economic exploitation.

For all of its shortcomings since its inception a couple of hundred years ago, our plutocratic government has nowhere else failed so miserably as in the area of our economic relationship with each other, the distribution of our nation’s wealth. Our ‘representatives’ have demonstrated ad nauseam and beyond all possible doubt that the few are quite unwilling and incapable of representing “we the people,” all of the people, in this critical area of our relationship. With the wealthy in charge of our nation’s purse, we have a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop. The result is a very fat fox.

Wealth would have you believe that economic activity in the private sector exists somehow in a vacuum, that “the invisible hand of the market” makes fair and just decisions, moving wealth, products, and services to where they are most needed and serviceable. Wealth would have you believe that government is the only place where redistribution of wealth takes place, that redistribution does not take place within the marketplace. Wealth would have you believe that the bargaining between the giant, multinational corporation and the person walking in off the street looking for a job magically reaches an equitable contract and relationship. Wealth would have you believe that employees are justly rewarded for their work and that the wealthy are not overcompensated. Wealth would have you believe that America has a level economic playing field. Wealth would have you believe that there is no such thing as class warfare in America, that the wealthy few have not been waging a long-standing, ongoing battle against the many. Wealth protests that anyone discussing class warfare or even suggesting that economic classes exist in America is only stirring people up and agitating them for no real or good reason.

But economic fairness is absolutely not the case. America is not a land of equal opportunity; it is a land of unequal opportunism. Wealth created our government, and it continues to own and populate our government. Wealth has our government in its hip pocket. From the constitution to the resulting body of law to the many public and private sector institutions, government defines by law and practice a great deal of advantage to business and industry and against labor and to the wealthy few and against the many.

In response to the pressures and rewards exerted upon it by the powerful and wealthy few, government favors them by its laws and practices. This in turn makes the few even more powerful and wealthy, which in turn allows them to exert even more pressure upon government. This vicious circle causes ever more power and wealth to become concentrated into the hands of the few. Wealth in America has managed to utterly crush American labor and its labor unions, rivals and often exceeds our government in its power, and literally overpowers most smaller governments around the world. The American aristocracy and the multinational corporations it owns now reign supreme. In America today 1% of the population hoards 50% of our nation’s wealth. Ten percent of our population hoards 90% of our nation’s wealth.² There is no mechanism in the private sector to counteract or restrain this greedy excess. Our unjustly-managed capitalism does wonders at creating wealth but falls completely on its face when it comes to distributing that wealth.

While money moves both up and down within the private and the public sectors, in Wealth’s having every advantage in the private sector most wealth moves to the top. The public sector, i.e., government, via taxation and the expenditure of the collected taxes, is the only potential mechanism for moving wealth from the top to the bottom. But it is in our nation’s federal tax code and its execution that our representatives’ violations of their offices and their utter lacking in moral integrity have been most glaringly evident. This several-thousand-page labyrinth of lies, deception, favoritism, and evasion is one of the most important tools (but certainly not the only tool) that the wealthy and the elected ‘representatives’ they own use to execute their economic scam against the rest of the nation.

The vast majority of Americans have no honest representation within this government. And yet they are taxed! Non-wealthy Americans exist under the injustice of taxation without representation. The founders understood well the real power of the purse. This work has stated as a fundamental principle: That society is best and that government is most legitimate in which real power is the most widely distributed within the populace. To move our nation toward anything even remotely resembling fairness and justice we must remove this critical area of our relationship with each other, taxation, from the plutocratic branches of government and place it into the hands of all of us, the electorate of the demos, where we may directly represent ourselves and our own true interests.

The only way taxation can be moved out of the other branches of government and into the demos is to greatly simplify the federal tax system. This is for two reasons: 1) The electorate must be able to understand and handle the issues included in the demos. 2) A simple system cannot be corrupted by using complexity and obfuscation.

All current laws pertaining to federal taxation of every kind including user or usage fees should be eliminated and replaced by three simple taxes: a tax on corporate and business annual gross revenue (not net profits), a personal income tax with no exclusions of any kind for anyone, and a tax on personal inheritance. These three taxes and a greatly simplified tax determination process should then be moved into the fourth branch of government, the demos, within the hands of all of us, not the privileged few.

In removing from their hands the current principal area of their economic scam plus other alterations which will be discussed later, our elected officials could better focus on the efficient management of our society within the means and parameters set by the demos. Who knows? They might even rise to the level of helmsmanship and statesmanship and become the true servants of the people that they profess to be.

With the sole power to tax placed into the hands of all of us by means of the demos, there would still be a feeding frenzy in the plutocratic branches of government over the collected tax revenue, but at least we will have achieved control over how much wealth we wish to feed into the frenzy. And, as we shall see later in this work, the elected officials participating in the feeding frenzy would be much more representative of all of us and not just the elite.

The negative characterization of elective office holders presented in this work should not be construed as applying to every elected person. We are well aware that there are some good people in government. There are good representatives, senators, and presidents. The problems are 1) that these rare folks are not the rule but the exception to the rule, and 2) these few can accomplish only little working within the confines of our unjust political system and in the midst of the usual types that end up in these offices and surrounding them. It is the recognition of this unfortunate situation that causes many good people to decline political office and work instead “outside the system” to better our society.

Now, on to brief discussions of the specific issues that have been suggested be included in the demos.

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Footnotes

1 The wealthy often present devious, narrowly-targeted statistics in support of their claim that the American income tax system is progressive, and they, therefore, pay taxes at a higher rate than do others. This may be true for the few among them who have not applied sufficient tax loopholes and evasions to reduce the amount of income taxes they pay. But the personal income tax is only one among many kinds of taxes. When all taxes and fees in America are considered together, the burden is extremely regressive. All (purportedly “fair”) fixed or percentage user fees or taxes on products, services, and processes—for example, a license fee or a sales tax, in which each person pays the same fee or percentage amount of tax for a given amount of product or service—are, in truth, regressive taxes when one’s annual income is taken into consideration. When paying the same sales tax on a particular item, a poor person pays a higher percentage of his or her annual income than a wealthy person pays. That such fees and taxes are regressive, subjecting the poor to higher tax rates expressed as a percentage of annual income than the wealthy, is why such fees and taxes (including the proposed consumption tax, i.e., a national sales tax to replace the income tax, and “fee for service”) have been all the rage among the wealthy in recent years. Ever more of the tax burden becomes dumped by the wealthy unto everyone else. As for the flat tax, its main attraction among the wealthy is that it prevents their ill gotten gains in the private sector from ever being redistributed in the public sector. While saying nothing publicly about this, their main selling points for the flat tax to unsuspecting others are that it is simple to calculate and it is “fair.” Indeed, a 10% tax for all sounds fair at first glance until one explores the deeper truth within. As for the simple calculation of a flat tax, a progressive, sliding-scale tax with no exemptions of any kind for anyone is equally simple to calculate using a simple look-up chart. The flat tax is for flat heads. 1

2 Similar figures have been variously presented in several sources over the years. In the July 22, 2001 issue of the San Diego Union Tribune in an article entitled Skewed distribution of wealth has us on perilous path, Don Bauder writes, “The top 1 percent of households has more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent.” Don Bauder quoted the statement from another source, a group called United for a Fair Economy. In the next paragraph Don Bauder writes, “The 400 richest Americans are worth more than $1 trillion, as much wealth as the 50 million households in the bottom half of the population.” Wealth and the establishment’s legal enterprise including the Supreme Court usually present the current distribution of wealth, the Status Quo, as society’s “natural” state, as our natural state in nature. One trillion! That’s a big pile of bananas for 400 monkeys to be sitting on! It is not nature which creates our lopsided distribution of wealth but our plutocratic constitution, government, laws, and economic practices. 2

Chapter 15 Issues That Would Be Included in the Demos

Footnotes

Chapter 15
Issues That Would Be Included in the Demos