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Corporate profits should NOT be how we measure success!
Corporations exist to make more money for shareholders and CEO’s etc. They will replace a worker with a machine in a heartbeat to make another buck. They will cut environmental pollution corners in a heartbeat to make another dollar. They will fire older workers to hire cheaper younger ones. They will close factories and move them to China. Because short term profits are all they care about not our communities, our families or our planet.
Our measurement of how society and our nation is doing should NOT be corporate spending or earnings or wall street profits. It should be things like the average longevity of our people, which as been going down the past several years! It should be low levels of personal debt and access to upward financial mobility of people from the lowest economic percentile to the the top. It should be people’s sense of wellness and work life balance.
These things come when people don’t have to live in daily economic fear and anxiety because we have basic human rights and conditions established together via our taxes ie democracy.
This is called a social democracy like you see in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and many other nations to varying degrees.
Social democracies rank as seen here in FORBES as the most business friendly nations in the world. This is because when people don’t have to fear for economic survival each day they tend to create great businesses and thrive, the entire economy thrives.