BESTism, or how we can save capitalism from hollow consumerism

Before you dive into this piece, you might want to go back and read the original blog piece in which I introduced BESTism. It will save us both some time! 

You back already? That was a suspiciously fast read, but OK!

So as you know from having read that original piece (which you totally read, right?!), my goal is to suggest an alternative to our current system of consumerism in an effort to save capitalism from itself, because my feeling is that if we don't, the ever-widening inequality of our current system and the sense of purposelessness it brings will eventually cause it to collapse, and that would be catastrophic for our society.

Let's start by attacking and destroying a false premise, to wit: that capitalism and consumerism are essentially synonymous and the latter is inevitable in the former. You have only to examine other capitalist countries to see that in fact there is nothing inevitable about it if the people and their leaders choose to avoid it. We have not taken than route here in the US, so our economy is 70% based on consumer demand. And look where it has left us. Most people feel our country is on the wrong track. Millions of Americans feel hopeless and without a sense of purpose, driving addictions and suicide rates to ever-higher peaks. Opioid addiction is skyrocketing. Suicide rates have risen an astonishing 30% in just 17 years. I even think our obesity epidemic is partially due to this sense of hopelessness: we are becoming a nation of nervous, emotional eaters.

I believe these trends are tied to how hollow we collectively feel our pursuits are. There is no unifying sense of purpose. There is no moonshot. No war on poverty. No grand goals and projects to make us feel that we are all contributing to something bigger than we are as individuals. To change that, I propose we refocus our economic activity, not through command-and-control communism, but by a modified form of safety-net capitalism in which we direct more resources towards Building,  Exploration, Science, and Teaching.

Let me go ahead and rip a Band-Aid off for you right now: this absolutely means higher taxes for everyone. But before you balk too loudly at that, I ask you to consider not the COST of your current tax burden but your RETURN on it. Are you happy as a citizen? Are you economically secure and confident that you could stay that way if you encountered any setback? Are you healthy and assured of coverage if that changes? Are you confident in the infrastructure you rely on every day? If you answered no to those questions, or even most of them, then you should consider that perhaps you're getting a poor return on your investment with your taxes.

Before we move on to the BEST, let's start with two dependencies: health and basic economic security. If you don't have those two things, nothing else matters and you can't focus on the 'big picture,' since you are forced to spend all your energy on merely surviving  (which is key to why Republicans' success relies on keeping people poor and unhealthy). And right now, too many Americans don't have those basics. So to me, any successful system in the 21st century is going to have to have two features: universal healthcare and basic guaranteed income. I believe the simplest route to providing those is to expand Medicare to everyone, allow the importation of cheaper drugs from places like Canada, allow Medicare to use its leverage to negotiate better drug prices, and to send every US citizen and legal resident aged 18 and older $1040.83 a month (in 2019 dollars, adjusted by the trailing year CPI minus 0.5% every year, and fully adjusted for inflation every five years). Parents would also receive $368.33 per month per minor dependent. To keep the system simple, to avoid fraud, and to avoid rural voters becoming resentful of urban ones, I do not think we should make regional/urban COL adjustments. If local municipalities want to make up the difference, they can introduce local schemes to do that, funded by local taxes. For example, New York City may wish to introduce a local tax to supplement their UBI (universal basic income), given that one can't even rent a room in that city at that rate. Another advantage of UBI is that it eliminates our complex web of welfare programs. Combined with universal Medicare, we could eliminate dozens of programs, from Medicaid to SNAP to CHIP. And while yes, taxes would be quite high, keep in mind that your income is now supplemented and you never have to worry about healthcare premiums (except for Medicare supplements) and everyone is getting the UBI, so you're getting back a lot of that money. One question many people will want to ask is, does EVERYONE get the UBI? And the answer is yes. The goal is to avoid class resentment. We all get the exact same check every month, and everyone pays in. (And speaking of paying in, this system assumes we lift the cap on Social Security contributions. Retirement should be simplified, too, with Social Security payments simply becoming a threefold increase in your UBI check starting on your 68th birthday.)

A supplementary way to ensure everyone has the basics is to make work worthwhile. That means a minimum wage of $15 per hour for everyone aged 18 and over, to be phased in over four years,  and then to increase to $20 within four years of that. After that, we should permanently solve the minimum wage issue by pegging it to the CPI. It should increase automatically by the CPI minus 0.5% points every year, and have a catch-up with CPI every five years. (This is to avoid sparking inflation.) 

The above measures would be paid for by the appropriate combination of payroll, capital gains, and dividend taxes, and a yearly 4% wealth tax on the value of everyone's non-retirement stock/bond/mutual fund portfolios and bank accounts, with the first $10,000,000 exempt (with that threshold to increase automatically by the CPI every year).

So, now we have healthy citizens who don't live in constant fear of losing their jobs. All but the very least materialistic people are still incentivized to work, because very few people are happy living on such a paltry sum (though at least you won't starve if you're one of those people). Now we can focus on actually accomplishing something as a society, by dedicating more to doing our B.E.S.T.

1) Building. Think about all the ancient civilizations you studied in school. Rome. Egypt. Greece. Tell me the first thing that comes to mind. If you're like most people, I suspect your brain immediately conjured up images of amphitheaters, coliseums, pyramids, and temples. In short, the legacy you associate with these civilizations is most tangibly expressed in the buildings they left behind for us. What will future civilizations think of us based on our own works? Not much, quite frankly. They might be impressed with a few isolated works of architectural genius and a stadium or two. But mostly their archaeologists will just scratch their heads and say, "well, they certainly liked their strip malls and Starbucks, didn't they?"  

Another challenge for our country is our crumbling infrastructure. Thanks to the GOP's "Starve the Beast" philosophy, our investment in infrastructure has been entirely too low for decades now. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives us a D+. And I find that to be generous. Collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, outdated airports, poor public transportation: our country is quite literally falling apart. 

My recommendation is to drive both cultural and non-consumerist economic growth by making massive investments in building and infrastructure, both to leave a better legacy and to increase our current quality of life.

To the first goal, I would love to see every state and all five territories submit plans for a state monument to commemorate each locale's people, history, and culture, to be financed by the states and territories but with each dollar matched 1:1 in federal funds. Each state's legislature would approve the final project and its location, with Congress having a say in approving the matching funds in each individual case. Think St. Louis Arch, Statue of Liberty, etc.

To the second goal, we need to invest, invest, invest. To that end, I would suggest a ten-year, 2.8% tax on every transaction in the United States, including B2B ones and all capital gains and dividends (on top of current taxes). After 10 years, it would drop to a permanent 1.8%. In addition, we would need a permanent $1-a gallon-gas tax, to be increased by the trailing CPI + 0.1% every year. This is only fair: American drivers are not currently paying for the roads and bridges they drive on. Furthermore, this tax helps cover the negative economic, health, and environmental externalities associated with driving, and also offers a strong incentive for people to economize on gas consumption and seek alternative forms of transportation. 

This massive investment in infrastructure wouldn't just be about getting an A+ on our roads, bridges, railroads, ports, and airports. It would also be about expanding our transportation options, with investments in regional high-speed rail and, if the technology pans out, hyperloops.

2) Exploration. Few things gave Americans as much pride as our accomplishments during the Space Race of the 1950s to early 1970s. Putting a human being on the moon was an achievement for the  ages and to this day, half a century later, it stands as an enduring reminder of our former greatness. We can return to that greatness by kicking off a new, ambitious Space Race. But we should not just look to space: our oceans represent another Final Frontier, with so much of them still unexplored. Such exploration could teach us volumes about biodiversity, ocean sustainability, even basic biology and zoology, since we would doubtless discover new species. So aside from investing far more in NASA and getting them on their way to a quick return to the moon and a Mars landing by 2032, we should also establish an Oceanographic Exploration Agency. Finally, while it may sound like outlandish science fiction, we should also invest more in the greatest exploration of all: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), or at any rate for basic extraterrestrial life. Research in this area in the past decade has shown that, with the right investment, our generation may be the last to think itself alone in the universe. I am not suggesting we have much hope of actually communicating with any alien civilizations. Unfortunately, the physics and the sheer size of the distances between star systems make this is highly unlikely if not impossible. But we are living in an age where we may yet be able to prove the existence of such life, even if it turns out to be simple in nature.

These initiatives would be funded by a 0.2% tax on all transactions in the United States, including B2B ones and including capital gains and dividends (on top of current taxes).

3) Science. Basic science drives technology. Technology drives change. Change drives culture and gives society a sense of direction. I think we need to invest far more in basic scientific research, with the benefits shared with all. I believe this can be done within our existing framework of universities, colleges, and government agencies, so to me this is just a simple question of investing more money through university/college grants and agency budget increases for agencies like DARPA, NIH, NIMH, CDC, etc. We also need to spur innovation in clean energy research, and nothing motivates innovation like necessity. I therefore propose that we phase in a simple mandate that wouldn't even require Congressional action: over the next ten years, every business with more than 50 employees that does government contracting work must be able to demonstrate it is getting 10% of its energy from renewables, increasing 10 percentage points each year. This will drive demand from energy consumers, and that will in turn drive innovation and change among energy providers. Another simple step requiring only executive action would be to declare that effective immediately, the US government will only purchase electric or hybrid vehicles for all its civilian vehicle fleet acquisitions. 

4) Teaching. Education isn't just a goal for its own sake. A better-educated society is a happier, more productive society, not to mention a society better equipped to drive the three goals above. The first thing we have to do is stop failing our poor communities. Since so much of school funding is driven by the local tax base, poor communities are stuck in a vicious cycle: too poor to educate their kids, who then grow up to get lower-paying jobs, which keeps the tax base low, which keeps school funding low. To solve this, I think we need to look at the poorest 40% of school systems in the United States and invest enough in them from federal funds to bring their spending levels up to the national median each year. To keep local government from slashing funds in order to qualify for more funds, we would measure this by the per-capita income of the residents of the school system, not by the amount of funds the locality chooses to dedicate, and funding levels would be judged by where they stood before the program was announced. These funds would be no-strings-attached. Let the local school systems decide how to educate their kids. The only caveat would be that we would need to set maximums for capital investments and minimums for teach salaries, because American school systems have an unfortunate tendency to over-invest in the former and under-invest in the latter compared to other countries.

Higher education. I hate the idea of government price controls. I truly do. Command-and-control economies always fail. But our colleges and universities are drunk with power. They know kids need those diplomas, so they keep jacking up tuition prices, often to spend on the most unnecessary of "investments." As a result, the ratio of tuition to average income gets more unsustainable every year. I propose a 30-year moratorium on real-dollar increases in tuition, with both private and public universities limited to tuition increases equal to the CPI minus one percentage point each year or wage growth minus one percentage point each year, whichever is lower. This needs to last a generation to undo the obscene increases of the past generation, increases that have seen the end of the age when people could work their way through school on their own and the dawn of the age of massive student debt. Tight regulations and oversight would be required in order to avoid the creation and exploitation of loopholes. (Think "Oh, we didn't increase TUITION. We increased USER FEES. See, that's totally different!") I also propose that all college students receive $2000 per month while enrolled in school, with assistance ending for any student whose overall GPA falls below 1.8 on the 4-point system. This assistance would last two years for an Associate's degrees, four years for a Bachelor's degree (five in special cases, e.g. some engineering undergraduate degrees that take five years). Students would be on their own for graduate work. Finally,  we need to reverse the law that made it illegal to include student debt in bankruptcies. There is no rational reason this debt should be excluded. It was a sell-out to the student loan industry, nothing more. 

These goals would be funded by a 5% tax on every transaction in the United States, including B2B ones, and on all capital gains and dividends.

In all cases where we raise money from taxes on transactions, this would include on sales to or from the government. It may sound silly for the government to pay itself taxes, but it's important we capture revenue from the entire economy, so the taxes would be transferred from the purchasing agency to the IRS.

One final word on revenue. To achieve our goals, we are going to have to address the elephant in the room: our out-of-control and irrational military spending. I am not a dove. In a world in which authoritarian regimes like Russia and China are on the rise, we cannot unilaterally disarm or even slightly weaken our military readiness. But our budget long ago stopped being about military readiness and efficiency. It is about delivering pork to Congressional districts and to the defense contractors who pay the lobbyists and contribute to campaign funds. Consider the fields of tanks that have never been and will never be used (and the military knew that when they bought them); the planes that were obsolete before they went into production; the ships that don't even work. These are all billions and billions of wasted dollars that do absolutely nothing to strengthen America. Quite the contrary: they weaken us. Meanwhile, our soldiers are paid disgracefully and often do not have the things they need. And don't even get me started on how shabbily we treat our veterans.

So what needs to happen? We need to establish a non-partisan, Congressionally-appointed commission to do a two-year, program-by-program audit and evaluation of the entire military budget for all branches. We need to evaluate not just programs but bases, both domestic and foreign, as well as all inventory, all with only one question in mind: does this help us face the threats of the 21st century, including the three main threats (terrorism, cyber warfare, and the potential for wars with China and Russia)? If it doesn't, it needs to go. Also, we need to pay our soldiers better, especially the enlisted ones. I think it is very realistic to cut military spending by 15%, increase pay for enlisted by 10% and commissioned officers by 5%, and actually INCREASE our military readiness and strength in the process. This needs to be a standing committee once its work is done, because we need to rely on them, not partisan pork-seekers in Congress, to evaluate what is best for our defense. Congress could agree to pass only legislation that includes commission-approved programs and budgets. This takes the political pressure off of them, as they can say to constituents that they are bound to obey the recommendations of the program. This could easily save us $120 billion a year.

So there it is. That is my model for how capitalism can save itself. No big takeovers of industry by the government. Minimal interference in the capitalist free markets. Just an investment in making us a healthy, happy, educated society with a sense of common purpose and a dedication to leave a livable planet and a vibrant legacy for our children and our descendants.