Timothy Shepard for United States Senate

Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law

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Transform Our Economy

This century is America's for the taking. With energy independence, food independence, a diverse, vibrant, and growing population. But we aren't without some of the most significant challenges we've ever faced, not just as Americans, but as humans. These challenges are going to require us to transform our economy with bold and aggressive vision and action.

Enact Universal Basic Income & Retirement

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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.

Before 1980, economic growth lifted all boats and was evenly distributed across social economic classes. After 1980, the economic gains have been concentrated heavily on the top 1%.
Before 1980, economic growth lifted all boats and was evenly distributed across social-economic classes. After 1980, the economic gains have been concentrated heavily on the top 1% with the bottom 50% only enjoying a 1% increase. Data source: Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States.” Working Paper 22945. NBER Working Papers. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016. Sourced from, “Open, the Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital,” by Kimberly Clausing.

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.

Transform Our Economy

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America has been heads down and focused in one direction for 40 years. Reaganism has its place as a short term medicine, but the manic adoption and diligence of how we’ve applied it has led to unsustainable imbalances in our economic system not seen in the United States since before the Great Depression. We need to transform our economy back into a healthy expression of capitalism. We’ve transformed from a healthy capitalist system to a system that heavily subsidizes corporate shareholders, otherwise known primarily as the 1%.

But, we aren’t stuck with this kind of financial folly in our social contract. This century is America’s for the taking, including the bottom 90% of the population. With our nation’s energy independence, food independence, a diverse and vibrantly, and growing population. We aren’t without some of the most significant challenges we’ve ever faced, not just as Americans, but as humans. These challenges are going to require us to transform our economy.

Transform Our Economy

The good thing about transforming our economy is that it creates vast new opportunities for wealth creation and innovation. So, rather than adopting a protectionist rear looking plan preferred by Republicans in government. It’s my firm belief that we should practice a core tenant of capitalism and embrace the change! One has to ask what exactly it is they’re trying to protect with all their worker facing rhetoric. Have they been able to save working-class American jobs? Or is the real result that they hand trillions of dollars to industry incumbents and billionaires who have no desire to use their profits to push this transformation themselves. We have a word for that kind of behavior in America, monopoly! We break those up. Doing so creates new jobs, distributes power, and ensures that innovation is able to take root rather than being stifled by incumbants.

When we have policy like the Green New Deal on the table, there’s no reason for us to lean into protecting elites with taxpayer subsidy. Instead we can lead the world in innovation and job creation once again.

We should bring an end to this new Gilded Age we’ve entered and re-ignite growth for the working classes. We can transform our economy to be more dynamic equitable for all Americans.

Data source: Peter Chen, Loukas Karabarbounis, and Brent Neiman, “The Global Rise of Corporate Saving.” NBER Working Paper 23133 (2017)

With economic transformation we can bring household savings in line with corporate savings with policies and new legislation aimed at bring equality to all American’s in our tax code, stimulus, and other social programs.