Jonathan Curiel’s True Slant Interview
December 18, 2009 by Johnperkins
Filed under JohnPerkins.Org Blog Wire
I wanted to post this piece Jonathan Curiel wrote after we talked at the Commonwealth Club meeting in California. Here’s an excerpt of the piece and I’ve put a link to the full article as well.
“Like other pundits and liberal economists, Perkins says the American public can’t assume Obama will do right on the economy. Through letter-writing, phone-calling, and other grassroots lobbying, people should try to “force” the Obama administration into more adequate economic reforms, Perkins said.”
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I like your idea Raymond, that it’s not so much having to do more than it is a kind of negative sculpting, as in taking away from the block of marble rather than adding to it.
John, I think we need to ask this question: what kind of reforms are needed?
All-out socialism is out of the question, given how bad the economies of Russia and China were during the height of Communism. And unfettered capitalism is also out of the question, given what happened last year.
In my opinion, we need to do three things right now:
1) Massively overhaul our national taxation system. The current income tax system based on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, costs Americans US$500 billion per year in compliance costs, causes American citizens and businesses to take something like US$15 TRILLION out of the US financial system for tax avoidance purposes, and “outsource” jobs by the millions for the same reason. We need to go with either Steve Forbes’ very simple flat-tax plan or the even more radical “FairTax” plan to stop these economy-sapping practices.
2) Massively overhaul our financial system. We need to regulate or ban these new “exotic” investments like hedge funds, derivatives, credit default swaps, etc.–investments that have no regulatory control and could collapse easily in any economic downturn. We should also increase the “minimum margin requirements” on trading in stock and commodities to slow down the speculation on stocks and commodities that drive up and down the prices in a very short period of time. And finally, reimpose the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act to “firewall” bank assets from the ups and downs of the stock market.
3) Begin a decade-long process of phasing out the “fiat currency” US dollar in favor of a asset-based US dollar backed by a combination of gold, silver, platinum, nickel and copper (the most common metals used in coins and bullion blocks that can act as currency).
4) Aggressively use the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts–or write an all-new antitrust act that better works with today’s economic systems–to break up the increasingly centralized control in almost every industry.