A FREE BOOK FOR YOUR FEEDBACK

SUBMITTED BY BOB BIVONA

Public revenues from higher taxes on high incomes and taxes on large amounts of wealth can be used in ways that will create economic boom and greatly improve other social conditions. If the 34 public policies that my forthcoming book, The New Enlightenment, details are instituted they will lift tens of millions of Americans out of poverty to a standard of living that now exists in the middle class, substantially improve the standard of living of tens of millions more, create a true democracy and have other major beneficial impacts. These policy impacts will occur while GDP increases and a $500 billion annual federal budget surplus is created. Higher taxes on high incomes and taxes on large amounts of wealth are needed to accomplish this.

Analysis of historical data reveals a positive correlation between economic growth and top tax rates. Contrary to the claims of “supply side” economists, economic growth tends to be greater in years when top tax rates are higher. From 1951 to 1980, when the top rate was between 70% and 92%, average annual growth in the American economy was 3.7%. These tax rates that many of the most prominent “pundits” and politicians claim would cause economic disaster are in fact associated with the opposite, economic boom. The growth rate over the decade 2006 through 2015 averaged 1.4%.

Many factors are involved in economic growth. Correlation does not prove causation; however, the positive historical correlation of growth and top tax rates proves that higher top tax rates are not incompatible with higher growth rates, as the most prominent “pundits” in the media would have you believe. If the resulting increase in funds from the increase in top tax rates were used to reduce inequality, support research and development, infrastructure improvements, opportunity enhancing, and other economically stimulative policies the positive correlation results from a causal relationship. Reducing inequality is economically important because when economic disparities are extreme, there’s a depressing effect on economic activity resulting from the depressed purchasing power of large numbers of people.

Economic and political inequalities were the main motivations for the Enlightenment period’s societal transformations including the one that created the United States. Comparisons of data from medieval England and today indicate economic inequality is more extreme now than it was before the Enlightenment. For this reason and others, it is time for a new Enlightenment to again replace an aristocratic social order with one more egalitarian and democratic. For more information, see: www.newenlightenment.us.

Please mail a request for a free copy of my not yet publicly available 510-page book, The New Enlightenment, with a few sentences explaining why you are interested in it and would like to give me your feedback on it to Robert Bivona, PO Box 4103, N. Ft. Myers, FL 33918. Thank you.

Now is the time for The New Enlightenment, a twenty-first century peaceful American revolution.