Hiring people, paying people good wages and salaries
Paying taxes, even paying the taxes they have avoided through accounting tricks

Companies may be able to pay good wages, but it’s hard to cost out climbing health care costs. You can cover a salary, but that doesn’t mean you can also cover health care — which is why there are plenty of people who work, but do not have health care.

That’s why we need to address health care as an economic driver that affects job creation.

In my limited experience, good biz people pay their taxes.
They recognize that it’s stupid to soil your own nest.
What’s happened is that the tax code is so damn complicated that you can pay your taxes while others think anyone who pays taxes is a chump.

We need simpler tax laws and more enforcement against cheats.
Simpler laws would solve a lot of problems.

he worse offender is our government. Government cannot tax itself: so its only financial product is DEBT.

Since Ronald Reagan, and definitely under GHWB and his cronies, there was a belief that ‘capital’ was the key driver of economic growth.

Capital is managed by people in ‘finance’.
‘Finance’ gained clout and by the late 1990s it was running the show. (I’ll spare you a digression about how ideas from software and eComm infected assumptions about ‘capital’, but the short version is that a lot of people in ‘finance’ didn’t know jack shit about their ‘products’ — other than that they made tons of money buying and selling them.)

In the early 1900s’, ‘government’ created national parks; look up how much revenue those generate some day. Lots of ‘business interests’ would like to buy, own, and operate our national parks.

‘Government’ at its best also ‘produces’: clean water, electricity, safety standards, meat inspections, and a host of other good outcomes.

Government does not ‘produce’ debt, unless and until it has been captured by ‘finance’. Debt is not always a bad thing; however, what we’ve had in the US, enabled and accelerated by dumb laws, has been the creation of debt by private interests — who then profit magnificently from that debt.

Here’s hoping that group that Brooksley Bourne was appointed to can tell this story better than I ever will.

Fiat and ever increasing debt is what generates financial bubbles.

I disagree.

Currently, ‘monetary policy’ regulates currency.
Credit ALSO needs to be regulated!

Financial bubbles are generated by social activities, including hype, hedging, and unregulated derivative trading.

i agree with you. I would love to see American capitalism fail.

I’m confused.
Upthread, I stated that I am an advocate of ‘Main Street Capitalism’.

The global finance capitalism of which you speak has created bubbles, and does not align with what people need. It creates financial capital while destroying ’social capital’.

Social capital is not recognized as having value by globalization dweebs like the egoists on Wall Street who swap CDOs.

We need to address pricing structures, tax incentives, and the way that we value social support; currently, we value money and finance over the creators of **social capital**.

If you want to see environmental nightmares, look at parts of the USSR. I have zero interest in aiding or abetting that economic system, and it quite clearly did not work.

‘Capitalism’ is a big, messy word that covers too much territory to be very useful.
I believe that on average, capitalism best aligns with how people make decisions; but the type of capitalism represented by CDOs, by TARP bailouts — by bogus mortgage fraudsters — that’s a disaster.

I want American capitalism to escape the chokehold and the suffocating predation of the global finance interests who don’t give a rat’s ass about the relationships that need to happen in communities all over the planet.

That’s very different from saying that I want American capitalism to fail.
I want it to succeed.

The US went off the gold standard decades ago, when it became obvious that trying to do it that way was a short route to No Money.

Read about the years right after the American Revolution: cash was scarce, so people bartered for everything, or traded scrip and IOUs. Then states decided they wanted taxes paid in hard cash that no one had ….
That was what cased Shays’s Rebellion.

They don’t realize that the things that could deliver the greatest ROI in the current environment are:

Hiring people, paying people good wages and salaries
Paying taxes, even paying the taxes they have avoided through accounting tricks

And they pretend be compensated for their “talent”!