1975
Louis Kelso and the ESOP are featured on "60 Minutes," with Mike Wallace, broadcast over the CBS television network:
Mike Wallace: "For years, Kelso has been hopping around the country like an itinerant preacher delivering his sermon. He tells anyone who'll listen what he told the economic leaders assembled by President Ford: that proposals for more tax cuts and more welfare will never solve the economic mess we're in. They don't go to the root of the problem.
"Americans," says Kelso, "are a nation of industrial sharecroppers who work for somebody else and have no other source of income. If a man owns something that will produce a second income, says Kelso, he'll be a better customer for the things that American industry produces. But the problem is how to get the working man that second income."
The Tax Reduction Act of 1975 introduces the TRASOP or Investment Tax Credit ESOP...
http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/important-dates.html...Kelso long believed that he had not originated a new economic theory but only discovered a vital fact that the classical economists had somehow overlooked. This fact was the key to understanding why the private property, free market economy was notoriously unstable, pursuing a roller coaster course of exhilarating highs and terrifying descents into economic and financial collapse.
This missing fact, which Kelso had uncovered over years of intensive reading, research and thought, drastically modifies the classical paradigm which has dominated formal economics since Adam Smith. It concerns the effect of technological change on the distributive dynamics of a private property, free market economy. Technological change, Kelso concluded, makes tools, machines, structures and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contributions through labor.
Differential productiveness over time concentrates market-sourced income in the hands of those who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer goods and services. They already have most of what they want and need so they invest their excess in new productive power. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck which makes the private property, free market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the majority of people who depend entirely on wage income and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. And since, as Adam Smith laid down, economic demand begins with the consumer and consumer purchasing power, the production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._KelsoUS was still very involved in Nam in '69 and stayed that way until about 1975 when they pulled out.