That is not fair or sustainable. “Many workers displaced by trade and offshoring haven’t been able to find new jobs that pay as much as the previous ones,” noted the Brookings Institution policy expert Bill Galston in The Wall Street Journal on May 10, 2016:
These workers and their families are asked to make do with incomes that can be 40% lower than they once enjoyed. This is why the mostly ineffective Trade Adjustment Assistance program should be bolstered by adopting a system of wage insurance. Under this system, displaced workers would receive a wage supplement amounting to half the gap between their current and previous earnings, up to an annual maximum of $10,000. The supplement wouldn’t be permanent, but because it is tied to employment and is more generous than traditional unemployment insurance, it would give workers an incentive to find a job as quickly as possible. That would minimize the negative effects of extended unemployment while shoring up growth in the U.S. labor force.
4. She would make all postsecondary education at an accredited offline or online university or technical school fully tax deductible. If every person is going to have to be a lifelong learner, we need a tax environment that makes that economically as easy as possible for everyone. Moreover, it will create jobs. The more people who are lifelong learners, the more people will become lifelong teachers. Anyone with an expertise in any subject—baking, plumbing, column writing—will be able to create apps or podcasts to teach their specialty.
At the same time, she would make Common Core education standards the law of the land, to raise education benchmarks across the country, so high school graduates meet the higher skill levels that good jobs will increasingly demand. But those higher standards should be phased in with sufficient funding, so that every teacher can have the professional development time to learn the new curriculum those standards require and be able to buy the materials needed to teach it.
Mother Nature would also use her bully pulpit to urge every university to move to three-year undergraduate degrees from four. If universities in Europe, such as Oxford, or in Israel, such as the Technion, can instill enough learning into young people in three years to merit a BA or BS degree, American ones can do so as well and save their families 25 percent of the cost of a college degree and all that student debt.
5. She would roll back the 2005 “reform” of the bankruptcy laws, which has hurt start-ups by making it much costlier for entrepreneurs to declare bankruptcy and start again, especially those who used their credit cards for seed capital. As Business Insider reported on March 8, 2011:
Growing evidence exists that bankruptcy reform is promoting fear amongst entrepreneurs, retarding the growth of new ventures, delaying economic recovery, and preventing new and small businesses from doing what they’ve always done best: creating jobs …
A 2010 USC study established a direct link between changes in U.S. bankruptcy law and reduced entrepreneurial activity. Its authors concluded, “Many entrepreneurs go through several business models before they are successful … The harsh provisions of the new law appear to discourage some potential entrepreneurs from starting new businesses, and to keep entrepreneurs who have a business failure from starting anew.”
6. On immigration, she would be for a very high wall with a very big gate. That is, we need to tighten security on the 1,945-mile-long U.S.–Mexico border, with both more physical fencing and virtual fencing with sensors, drones, and televisions. Americans need to believe that they live in a country where the borders are controlled. But they also need to understand that to thrive as a country we need a steady flow of legal immigration. Our ability as a country to embrace diversity is one of our greatest competitive advantages. We need to control low-skilled immigration so our own low-skilled workers are not priced out of jobs, while removing all limits on H-1B visas for foreign high-skilled knowledge workers. We should also double the research funding for all of our national labs and institutes of health to drive basic research. Nothing would spin off more new good jobs and industries than that combination of more basic research and more knowledge workers.
7. To ensure that next-generation Internet services are developed in America, she would put in place new accelerated tax incentives and eliminate regulatory barriers to rapidly scale up the deployment of superfast bandwidth—for both wire line and wireless networks. Numerous studies show a direct correlation between the speed and scope of Internet access in a country and economic growth.
8. She would also borrow $50 billion at today’s almost-zero interest rates to upgrade our ports, airports, and grids and to create jobs.
9. She would ban the manufacture and sale of all semiautomatic and other military-style guns and have the government offer to buy back any rifle or pistol in circulation. It won’t solve the problem, but Australia proved that such programs can help reduce gun deaths.
10. To provide sufficient government revenues to pay for these investments, she would support major tax reform. For starters, she would eliminate entirely America’s corporate income tax, now 35 percent, the highest in the world. The global average is in the low 20s. John Steele Gordon, author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, pointed out the many benefits this would have in a December 29, 2014, essay in The Wall Street Journal: We would get rid of the legions of lobbyists and accountants wasting time trying to game the corporate tax system; with the increased profits this tax relief would bring to companies, many would “increase both dividends and investment in plant and equipment, with very positive effects for the economy as a whole and increased revenue to the government through the personal income tax.” At the same time, “stock prices, which are a function of perceived future earnings, would rise substantially, inducing a wealth effect as people see their 401(k)s and mutual funds rising in value. That would lead to increased spending and thus increased tax revenues … The distinction between for-profit and nonprofit corporations would disappear. So nonprofit corporations would not have to jump through hoops to qualify for that status” and “much of the $2 trillion of foreign earnings, now kept abroad to avoid being taxed when repatriated, would flow into this country.” Finally, America would go from the highest corporate income tax rate to the lowest, which would attract many more foreign corporate investors to the United States.
At the same time, she would embrace an idea President Obama contemplated in his first term—changing the inflation formula used to determine cost-of-living increases in Social Security checks to slow the annual growth in Social Security benefits and thus ensure the solvency of the system for future generations. Otherwise, she wouldn’t touch Social Security. In an age of zero interest rates, retirees will need it more than ever.
To generate the tax revenue sufficient to replace corporate taxes and other government income streams, she would use a carbon tax, a small tax on all financial trades (stocks, bonds, and currency) and a tax on bullets—with offsets for the lowest-income earners. She would also take away the preferential tax treatment for dividend income and for capital gains and tax them at the normal rate for income. We need a tax system that specifically incentivizes the things we want—investment, work, and hiring—and shrinks the things we don’t want: carbon emissions, corporate tax avoidance, overregulation, climate change, and gun violence. We simply can’t afford them any longer.
Think about this: on January 1, 2013, the U.S. Senate resolved its fiscal-cliff negotiations by agreeing on a $600 billion tax hike—$60 billion a year for ten years. Just a few days earlier, on December 28, 2012, the Senate approved a $60.4 billion aid package to help New York and New Jersey recover from the devastation caused by one storm—Superstorm Sandy—that raked across the eastern United States in October 2012. In other words, we spent on one storm all the new additional tax revenue for that year.
11. She would require labeling on all sugary drinks, candies, and high-sugar-content fast foods, warning that excess consumption can cause diabetes and obesity—just as labels on cigarette packages warn that they cause cancer. On April 6, 20
16, a study published in the respected journal The Lancet found that the global cost of diabetes is now $825 billion per year. The press release noted that “diabetes results in a person being unable to regulate levels of sugar in their blood, and increases the risk of heart and kidney disease, vision loss, and amputations … Using age-adjusted figures, they found that in the last 35 years, global diabetes among men has more than doubled—from 4.3% in 1980 to 9% in 2014—after adjusting for the effect of aging. Meanwhile diabetes among women has risen from 5% in 1980 to 7.9% in 2014.” It added that “the largest cost to individual countries [was] in China ($170 billion), the US ($105 billion), and India ($73 billion).” Mother Nature would not be for telling anyone what to eat, but she would be for making sure they are fully aware of the consequences of excess.
12. She would appoint an independent commission to review the Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting regulations to determine which—if any—of their provisions are needlessly making it harder for entrepreneurs to raise capital or start businesses. We need to be sure we’re preventing recklessness—not risk-taking.
13. She would also create a Regulatory Improvement Commission, as proposed by the Progressive Policy Institute in a May 2013 policy paper. The PPI argues that “the natural accumulation of federal regulations over time imposes an unintended but significant cost to businesses and to economic growth. However, no effective process currently exists for retrospectively improving or removing regulations.” Often agencies are asked to review their own regulations, and that rarely results in meaningful change. The RIC proposed by the Progressive Policy Institute would “be modeled after the successful Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission. The Commission would consist of eight members appointed by the President and Congress, who, after a formal regulatory review, would submit a list of 15–20 regulatory changes to Congress for an up or down vote. Congressional approval would be required for the changes to take effect, but Congress would only be able to vote on the package as a whole without making any adjustments.”
14. She would copy Great Britain and limit national political campaign spending and the length of the national campaign to a period of a few months. In a world that is getting this fast, we in America cannot afford to govern the country for one hundred days every four years and spend the rest of the time preparing for the midterms and presidential campaigns. That is insane.
15. She would encourage every state to end gerrymandering, by following California’s move to a nonpartisan commission of retired jurists who draw up congressional districts in the most balanced way possible. If you have nonpartisan boundaries, you are much less likely to have safe Republican or Democratic seats, so elections will be more competitive around the center and candidates will have to appeal to independent voters. In safe districts a Republican, most of the time, can lose only to another, more conservative Republican and a Democrat can lose only to a more liberal Democrat. The result is a Congress made up of more people from the far right or far left than the true disposition in the country. With more center-left Democrats and more center-right Republicans, it should be possible to build more legislative coalitions from the center out rather than from the extremes in.
She would also introduce ranked-choice voting in all Senate and House elections. In this system, instead of voting for just one candidate, you rank each candidate in order of preference. If no one gets a majority, the candidate with the least number of first-preference votes is eliminated. Then his or her votes are redistributed to those voters’ second preferences, and that process continues until somebody has a majority. This allows voters to embrace alternatives and take a flyer on someone outside the box, who might be from, say, a third or fourth party. You can take a chance on someone because if that person loses, your vote will be redistributed to your second preference. “These systems encourage innovation and the entry of new alternatives,” explained the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. We should also eliminate the sore loser ban. In forty-five states in America, if you lose your party’s primary you are not allowed—by law—to run in the general election. This prevents a moderate who might lose his party’s primary—to someone from the far right or far left—from running in a general election in which he would have a much better chance when all voters go to the polls.
16. On national security, she would ensure that our intelligence services have all the legally monitored latitude they need to confront today’s cyber-enabled terrorists—because if there’s one more 9/11, many voters will be ready to throw out all civil liberties. And with the world cleaving into zones of “order” and “disorder,” we’ll need to project more power to protect the former and stabilize the latter.
In regard to the latter, she would elevate and expand the Peace Corps to be an equal branch of service with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps, including with its own service academy. If the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps constitute our “defense,” the Peace Corps would be our “offense.” Its primary task would be to work at the village and neighborhood levels to help create economic opportunity and governance in the World of Disorder, thus helping more people to live decently in their home countries and not feel forced to flock to the World of Order.
17. She would condition all U.S. foreign aid to developing countries on their making progress on gender equality, and on access for every woman who wants it to family planning technology. As a global community, and environment, we simply can’t afford the population explosions that, in combination with climate change, desertification, and civil strife, are making more and more swaths of the world uninhabitable. The welfare burden on the World of Order and the stress on the planet generally will become increasingly disruptive and unmanageable. Family planning and poverty alleviation and climate mitigation are policies that have to coevolve and not be treated as separate.
18. She would initiate three “races to the top” from the federal level—with prizes of $100 million, $75 million, and $50 million—to vastly accelerate innovations in social technologies: Which state can come up with the best platform for retraining workers? Which state can design a pilot city or community of the future where everything from self-driving vehicles and ubiquitous Wi-Fi to education, clean energy, affordable housing, health care, and green spaces is all integrated into a gigabit-enabled platform? Which city can come up with the best program for turning its public schools into sixteen-hour-a-day community centers, adult learning centers, and public health centers? We need to take advantage of the fact that we have fifty states and hundreds of cities able to experiment and hasten social innovation.
In sum, in an age of extreme weather, extreme globalization, extremely rapid change in the job market, extreme income gaps, extreme population explosions in Africa that are destabilizing Europe, extreme deficits, extremely low interest rates, and extremely unfunded pension liabilities, we need to get extremely innovative in our politics. We need a dynamic, hybrid politics that is unafraid to combine ideas from across the traditional political spectrum and also to go above and beyond it. I am talking about a politics that can strengthen work-based safety nets, to catch those for whom this world is becoming too fast. I am also talking about a politics that can unleash accelerated entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth to sustain those needed safety nets. And I am talking about a politics able to stimulate more of the social technologies we need to keep up with all the changes in our physical technologies spurred by the age of accelerations. Finally, I am talking about a politics that understands that in today’s world the big political divide “is not left versus right but open versus closed,” as the pollster Craig Charney puts it, and that therefore chooses open—openness to trade, immigration, and global flows, as opposed to closing them off.
If the traditional left- and right-wing parties in America and across the globe can adapt themselves to this new agenda—which requires a much more heterodox approach to politics—well and good. But my guess is th
at many will implode as the pressure for adaptation, for mimicking Mother Nature, and for building resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations becomes too great for their rigid orthodoxies.
Since we started with Mother Nature’s wisdom, let’s end with the same: biological systems that thrive all have one thing in common, notes Amory Lovins: “They are all highly adaptive—and all the rest is detail.”
ELEVEN
Is God in Cyberspace?
There has never ever been a time when the human being was capable of doing something and yet, eventually, that something did not happen. That means one of three things: 1) the human psyche is going to change fundamentally (good luck with that!); 2) the worldwide social contract changes so that the “angry men” can no longer be “empowered” (good luck with that too!); or 3) boom!
Thank You for Being Late Page 39