Increasingly, more Americans will not be able to ever purchase a home, due to the packed inflationary wage and welfare base factored into the cost of building homes, which inflate prices, and will be forced to rent their entire life or depend on government living assistance -- not able to accumulate equity that can help to sustain them in their retirement years. And this is the new reality now facing people in the middle class. The uncertainty of holding onto a good job is frightening to an increasingly wider base of middle-class working citizens. When you factor in the average non-salaried worker, even with a government-mandated minimum labor wage rate of $10.00+ per hour in some states or proposals for a $15.00 per hour minimum wage, the outcome is grim. Never mind that consumer demand continues to dwindle because of insufficient income, solely tied to labor worker wages. The impact of the decline in consumer demand due to declining labor-worker wages is that production will decline or desist without sustainable consumer demand. And where there are signs of consumer demand, it is virtually always because consumers use credit cards and other forms of consumer debt to purchase products and services.
This is all coming about because we have severely mismatched the power to produce with the possession of unsatisfied needs and wants. Those capital "worker" OWNERS who have unsatisfied needs and wants have ready access through conventional finance to get as much or more capital as they want (especially with the near-zero interest funds rates provided by the Federal Reserve). Our tax laws are designed to further benefit the ultra-rich 1 percent by providing enormous write-offs and credits to producers (corporations) who are owned by the few, who already produce more than they can consume.
Note, though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers, their stock holdings are relatively minuscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
Those who have only their labor power and its precarious value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital OWNERSHIP to enable them to be capital "workers" as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs and wants. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive capital.
But if we change direction and systematically build earning power into consumers, we have the opportunity to reverse the depression perpetrated by systematically limiting the 99 percent to labor wages alone and through technology eliminating their jobs , and through labor-destroying globalization. We need solutions to grow the economy in ways that simultaneously create productive jobs and widespread equity sharing. We need to systematically make capital credit to purchase capital accessible to economically underpowered people (the 99 percenters) in which the income from the capital investment is isolated until it pays for itself, and then begins to produce a stream of dividend income to the new capital owners. This can only be accomplished by enabling every person to have access to capital OWNERSHIP and purchase the capital, and pay for it out of what the capital produces. It's time good and well-intentioned people woke up and adopted a JUST Third Way beyond the greed model of monopoly capitalism and the envy model of the traditional welfare state. This will promote peace, prosperity, and freedom through harmonious justice , as well as put us on the path to inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity and inclusive economic justice.
If you have read this far then hopefully you will explore in more depth the solutions and agenda for REAL change. The end result is that citizens would become empowered as OWNERS to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on the State and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
If we do not reform the system and create government that justly serves ALL the people, and restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled, the wealthy who seek to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption will continue to beggar their neighbor -- the equivalency of mass murder -- the impact of concentrated capital ownership, which will inevitably result in turmoil and upheaval, if not revolution.
Read "Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy" at http://foreconomicjustice.org/11/economic-justice/
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