We are in the midst of the most significant economic transformation in the history of our country and the world. Our institutions are years behind the curve, and the majority of Americans are getting left behind.
It’s time to build an economy that puts people over profits. My platform embraces many of the ideas popularized by Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend. It’s built around the core idea that everything should work to serve humans, not the other way around. I’m passionate about running a Humanity Forward campaign, always thinking and debating with peers about what’s best for humans, and putting that into practice once elected into office.
Abundance
Since the early 80’s, America has operated in a mindset of scarcity and has devised an unfair taxation system. It’s time that we unlocked humanity’s potential by moving our political discourse toward a mindset of abundance. Fighting for policies that will allow people to get their heads up and plan for the future.
The economy has fundamentally changed.
Automation and technology displace millions of workers in America and worldwide, including America’s leading trade partners, leading to a decreased labor force participation rate. The gig economy has accounted for a large majority of new jobs over the past decade. The old assumptions, companies would have to hire and treat their people well to keep talent around, break down. We’re seeing the most valuable companies employ fewer and fewer individuals. Threats such as global pandemics and climate change will impact workers in unprecedented ways if we don’t treat them as opportunity events to foster new innovation wealth creation.
Equalize the Opportunity Gap
The labor share of income in 35 advanced economies fell from around 54 percent in 1980 to 50.5 percent in 2014.
McKinsey Global Institute May 22, 2019 | Discussion Paper
One of my solutions for this economic shift is the Freedom Dividend – a universal basic income of $1,000/mo. There are myriad ways to pay for this. Primarily by working with everyone to leverage the > 1trillion dollars in static and unused capital sitting in cash on the balance sheets of some of America’s largest companies. One of America’s taxation system’s critical imbalances is how capital income and labor income are taxed. We don’t need to villainize success or our most remarkable success stories. I propose embracing fundamentally fair taxation by equalizing brackets between labor and capital income and a minimum corporate income tax without loopholes for companies that record profit of greater than $1billion. With capital gains taxes matching the progressive income tax system’s brackets, most of us know this via payroll taxes.
When we embrace fair taxation, putting capital gains and corporate tax brackets into a mode that emulates labor brackets via a market-to-market system, we can accomplish a two-fold goal; fair and equal taxation across income classes and deploying idle capital back into the economy. That helps to grow the economy from the bottom up. For more information on how fair taxation could raise more revenue, check out this study produced by the Brookings Institution.
