An Outline for Creating Ample Wealth and Income
for Every Resident in America

Preface

This book began with the purpose of laying the foundation for the need to level the playing field of wealth and income inequality in America. The gap between rich and poor are known to be so immense that it locks two-thirds of our population out of a fair standard of living, and it is the fundamental causal factor behind poverty in America. But that topic alone was too dreary and so intractably set in my consciousness that it burdened my soul to write exclusively about it. I needed to write about a solution to a grander issue that portends a realistic and powerful hope for all those who seek a better future for themselves and their loved ones. The contents therefore quickly changed to something considerably more positive: How to create prosperity for everyone. This perspective also required that I write about how to achieve a positive and uplifting outcome that is more about the humaneness of sharing our wealth than it is about reliving and condemning our faults.

Numerous studies have shown that excessive wealth and income inequalities are causal factors behind nearly every economic, social, emotional, or spiritual issue that you or I can imagine. On the “too much” side, it is linked to all the issues surrounding those at the top of the wealth curve from tax fraud to excessive gambling to high stakes living in exotic places—to a cold numbness about the conditions many millions of others must endure so that a few can live in regal opulence. On the “too little” side it is also linked to high crime rates, hunger, obesity, mental health issues, incarcerations, low self-esteem, suicides, illiteracy, teen pregnancies, and to social immobility. Wealth also is a controlling factor behind which legislative issues are considered by legislatures, and to how much or how little is spent to help solve the major issues of the day. In general human virtues rise and fall based on wealth: good habits, acts of love, orderliness, generosity, courage, wisdom, justice, self-control, assertiveness, modesty, helpfulness, peacefulness, forgiveness, purpose, responsibility, kindness, honesty, respect, tolerance, judgment, gratitude, humility, leadership, truthfulness, loyalty, courtesies, tact, and patriotism. Put a bit more concisely, greed drives wealth toward the high end of that continuum while poverty on the lower end follows in its absence. It therefore became imperative that a new model would need to be built that would open up new ways for those caught in the throes of poverty to climb out in pursuit of a fair standard of living that would afford them the chance to partake of a better way of life—for themselves and for their offspring. The driving moral imperative behind this subject was uttered many years ago by Horace Mann, the first president of Antioch College in Ohio, when he challenged us with this bold and sobering proclamation: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity. If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.”
______________________________________________________________________________

     “Be ashamed to die until you have won some  victory for humanity.”
                             --Horace Mann, 1859.
______________________________________________________________________________

Will this book solve all the issues listed above? Of course not. But by leveling the playing field moderately from one that is virtually insurmountable to one that is scalable is a step in the right direction on humanities’ trek toward a better world where enlightenment and fairness, if not truth, are the goals. Now let’s digest a few undeniable facts.

Did you know that the four richest persons in America have more wealth than the bottom one-half of our population combined? That bottom one-half consists of 165,000,000 individuals. And the “gap” between those two groups is more like a black hole, so dense and so powerful that anything that gets sucked in never comes out, not even light. For those same reasons, I don’t like to use the term “inequality” when referring to wealth or income differences between rich and poor. The real differences are as formidable to life on Earth as a black hole is to everything in the universe; they destroy hope, the will to live, and they affront human sensibilities at the interface of every social and moral interaction that we encounter.

Although this book is about wealth and income inequality, in order to grasp and assimilate this subject in its broadest context, it is necessary to identify the major source of the problems. That source is not an accident of nature, rather it is a carefully conceived contrivance by a small number of individuals. When viewed from a high vantage point, it becomes clear that others know much about political and economic goals quite well, and they have no intention of abandoning their stockpiles of wealth and power any time soon. After all, they conceived the plan about how to get theirs, and they built it piece by piece. The building process has taken about 40 years beginning in about 1980. In their early days the architects were known as neo-consevatives.

Neo-conservatism (“neo-cons”) is also a name that understates its purpose. It is an ideology best represented by an organization mislabeled, Americans for Prosperity (AFP). This is a group of American billionaires who support a long list of right-wing causes. Basically, they want control of our legislature, the executive branch, our Supreme Court, and a huge majority of our lesser federal and state law-making bodies. With bank accounts totaling in the billions of dollars, they damned-well mean to buy their way to their vision of a “promised land.” By any other names, they want a closed-society under their complete contol, one that is often known as a plutocracy, an aristocrasy, or authoritarian rule. For examples, see Russia, China, North Korea, or Cuba.

AFP focuses on both elections and policy battles at all levels of government, from city councils to Congress and the White House. Although its activities are mostly directed from its headquarters in Virginia, AFP is an extra-party organization that backs and funds Republican candidates and office-holders. By providing resources to support GOP candidates and officials, and exerting leverage on them once elected, AFP has been able to pull the Republican party to the far right on economic, tax and regulatory issues. It has active local, state and regional offices that reflect the federated nature of US politics It is against climate change, unions, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Social Security, and welfare; while it supports massive tax cuts for the wealthy. A few of its associates are Koch Industries headed by Charles Koch, an American inheritor billionaire with a current net worth of about $100 billion.

You can fact-check any of the preceding information. This narrative carries no imprematur of perfect knowledge from any source. But it is an enlightened collection of facts, elevated by the methods of science, submitted to the rules of logic, with limited conclusions, that are offered for open review by anyone. No asserttion is made that it is spotlessly and unerringly without errors down to the tiniest detail.