SAVING THESE UNITED STATES

So far the response to the financial melt-down in the United States has been a typically American one: greed. Greed feeds greed. The “bail-out” of America, as sponsored by both the Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration, is to let the future pay for it. For the next century, our children and grandchildren to the fifth or sixth generation will be paying for the greed and profligacy of our time.

George Bush financed his tax cuts for the rich with deficit spending, which is a polite word for increased debt. He paid and is paying for his bloody wars of aggression—and his absurd “Department of Homeland Security “—by increasing the national debt by three trillion dollars. And now the “bail-out” of long-failing but expensively-led corporations and greedy banks intending to make profits from the poor: we will pay for bailing them out by borrowing another few trillion dollars from the future. And it’s not the rich who will pay for all these loans: they and their wealth will be protected. It’s the poor who will be taxed.

The main problem with the supposedly United States that they aren’t united. They aren’t a culture, a society. These United States are made up of the rich—and everybody else. Our problem is not a lack of wealth, but the gross maldistribution of wealth. Our problem is greed.

The solution to the problem is relatively simple: redistribute the wealth. There is no civilised, social, moral reason for some people to have billions of dollars. So we must have a new law which says that every citizen of the United States has the right to own perhaps $100,000 a year of disposable wealth or property (excluding a single domicile) for every year of life left to him or her up to the age of seventy. All wealth in excess of that amount will become commonwealth.

If a family has but one bread-winner, and he or she has less that $50,000 in any year, the commonwealth fund will top that up so that the family will have $50,000 for the year. A citizen who is disabled or reaches the age of seventy will receive from the government $100,000 a year for the rest of his or her life.

If an individual fifty year-old citizen has more than $100,000 times twenty--$2,000,000—all money and property (excluding a single domicile) in excess of that $2,000,000 will be forfeit to the commonwealth. If a family of four—two thirty year-old parents, twins aged ten—has a combined wealth of more than $20,000,000, they will forfeit the excess.

A sixty-year old couple having a primary domicile fully paid for and worth $500,000, and another vacation home fully paid for and worth $300,000 may possess, jointly, $1,700,000. If the next year they own the same two homes, they may possess, jointly, $1,500,000. By the time they are sixty-eight, the can still have their two homes, but will be allowed only $100,000 jointly in addition. At age sixty-nine, they will have to sell the vacation home—and join the rest of the population who have but one domicile.

Rich institutions, like the Roman Catholic Church and Harvard University will likewise be required to disperse their gross wealth.

Why not? Why let Bill Gates sit on $50,000,000,000, and praise him for giving away $50,000,000? That’s but one-tenth of one percent of his wealth. That’s no more charity than my giving a dime a day to a homeless person.

Why let the Catholic Church pay no taxes on its wealth and property? The archbishop of Louisville complained at having to pay $26,000,000 for pedophile priests’s crimes; “I only have $52,000,000 in ready cash,” he said. Poor church!

Churches of all denominations are locked up most of the time; they are open to the public only six or seven hours a week. If they want tax exemptions, let them serve the public: let them be open for eight or ten hours a day, seven days a week, to provide comfort and shelter for the poor and the homeless. Let them feed the poor, every day. Otherwise, make them pay taxes. Require them to pay for their greed.

There is enough wealth in the United States to make a decent society for us all: to make a genuine commonwealth. It’s time for us to have a genuine revolution, and give ourselves the gift of freedom. In liberty, we each take care of ourselves, for ourselves; in freedom—which is friendly—we take care of each other, for the sake of us all.

I think I could pledge allegiance to such a country. And I suspect that the rest of the world would praise and admire us for being good citizens, and setting a good example for all of humankind. And then we wouldn’t have to be afraid of terrorist attacks or anything else bad.

9 January 2009