TAX REFORM AND SAVING SOCIAL SECURITY
John Q. Pridger
The administration and members of Congress are now beginning to make sounds about actually doing something about the abomination known as the Internal Revenue Code and saving Social Security.
Abolition of the infamous Income Tax and payroll withholding has been mentioned, and perhaps the enactment of a national sales tax, or VAT, tax to take its place. And some sort of "privatization" of Social Security is very much in the works.
Almost everybody would like to see the income tax disappear, and all the working poor and middle class would be very happy if Social Security could be kept solvent. But the problems with income tax and Social Security are but symptoms of more fundamental problems underlying the nation's monetary and fiscal woes.
None of the proposals are apt to save or fix anything. Nothing can be fixed when it exists within a larger broken framework. The monetary system has to be reformed before any tax reform, or reform of Social Security, will do any lasting good. But there isn't even the suggestion of a whisper of any such thing as monetary reform, and there hasn't been for almost a century.
Fix the dollar, and fixing other fiscal problems might actually become feasible. Letting the dollar continue on its death slide, as national indebtedness continues to mushroom, is nothing short of suicidal. But national suicide seems to be the purpose, and primary business, of modern politicians.
Unfortunately, fixing the dollar is won't be easy. It might be better to scrap the dollar and start a new coinage and monetary system from scratch. Pridger recommends that we dump the present dollar, and the debt that goes along with it, on the rest of the world and go onto a Rashbuckneck system.
But before we do it, we'll have to reestablish our national economic boundaries, and make it clear that Rashbucknecks are American money and not everybody else's. Everybody else can have our dollars, but not our Rashbucknecks.
Rashbucknecks will be like Abe Lincoln's greenbacks, but they will be red in color, to make them easier to see when dropped in the woods. They'll be called "Bucks" or "Rednecks" for short. Their value will be determined on a scientific basis to be determined by population and productive potential of the nation, and expressed in terms of man days.
One Rashbuckneck's "worth" will be the average value in goods and services required and available to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide utilities and transportation, for an average man for one day, including an allowance for extra beverages, smoking and chewing material, and video rentals, etc. In other words, the Buck would be considered the minimum daily amount of purchasing power requirement to provide a single person with a "decent" living standard, according to the current "state of the art" in America.
If a fair work week is considered to be five days, then five day's work should provide R$7.00 income. In other words, assuming a Seven hour day, and 35 hour work week, the hourly wage would be R$0.20 (twenty Rashbuckcents).
The minimum wage today, of about $5.50 an hour in terms of today's dollars, is actually worth about twenty cent's ($0.22), in terms of dollars at the turn of the twentieth century — the dollar having lost about 96% of its purchasing power over the course of a century of monetary debauchery.
A fair minimum wage today would be more like $10.00 an hour, based on the criteria we've mentioned for the Rashbuckneck, making the man-day worth about $70.00 in terms of today's dollars. Thus, One Rashbuckneck should be worth $70.00 of today's dollars. But let's make accounting and exchange a little easier and call it R$1.00 = $100.00.
The Birth of the Rashbuckneck system would be meaningless without some other fundamental changes in the way we currently do business. Fractional reserve banking would not be permitted in Rashbucknecks. Banking in Rashbucknecks would be a return to the storehouse or warehouse system of banking. The Rashbuckneck supply could not be made to grow by the whims of the banking system.
Of course the Rashbuckneck system would be a Constitutional system. There would be no income tax levied on labor, which should never be taxed. Only "unearned" income could be taxed, and that only above say 500% of the man-day income standard. Only the very well to do would be taxed, and that tax should be progressive.
The purpose of taxing the rich would not be to raise revenue for the government, nor to penalize talent and industry. Its sole purpose would be to prevent vast accumulations of wealth from accruing into fewer and fewer hands, and more money circulating among the population at large. The capitalist system should not be like the game of Monopoly where eventually all the players lose, except for the one who manages to gain all available property and money. Both property and money should be as evenly distributed as possible, within a free market society wherein as many people as possible participate in production enterprises.