Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
--Horace Mann

Creative thinking is what humans do best: It is our passport to the unknown. It unlocks our passions, our imaginations, and our deepest desires to a universe of wonders. Would you stop to ponder Horace Mann’s words (above) if they were emblazoned over the archway to every building where they are needed? I am referring, of course, to virtually every school, every building where federal, state, or local legislative bodies meet; and to every commercial enterprise that purports to pursue excellence and innovation, while rewarding those who make them happen. Perhaps his words could also be printed on their stationery. We might then see and hear a lot less of stifling comments such as “go along to get along,”or “be a team player,” or “don’t rock the boat.” We might also inscribe that message on our currency with these words: “Where encouragement  and creative thinking are expected.” We might even modify the Pledge of Allegiance with this:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God,
with liberty, justice, and prosperity for all.”

Critical thinking alone, however, is a bit too esoteric a term to carry the burden of convincing millions of residents of the relevancy and the urgency of the need to implement a comprehensive plan that would bring millions of residents under the canopy of prosperity. We also need a plan and vision that satisfy our goal. Our plan must cohere, coalesce, and flow effortlessly into the hearts and minds of the great majority of those affected by it. In my opinion, nobody elucidated a vision better than did Horace Mann. Prosperity is our moment. Prosperity is our need. Prosperity is our destiny. We must be willing to put our trust in ourselves in order to win that victory for humanity.

These essays are about fair wages and an honest distribution of our wealth for all. Those outcomes imply excellence, originality, and progress in finding the best that is in us. To those ends we also need to acknowledge and promote our responsibilities to each other, and not fall victim to misguided obstructionists masquerading as actors in the interests of humanity. History teaches us that the Renaissance was humanity’s clarion call to freedom of thought. We must all understand that if we let narrow-mindedness erase all the efforts of those who led us out of the Dark Ages, we would still be in the Dark Ages. We also would be without all the modern conveniences: a viable space program, wonder medicines, an orbital gps system, comfortable homes and pollution-free automobiles. But too many of our residents are living in squalor and misery with almost no hope of extricating themselves. Approximately 15 percent of US residents live in poverty, while 52 percent of us live with less than a Fair Wage where most could sustain themselves without government assistance.

A plan for changing how money flows within our economy is quite simple to put on paper in just a few strokes of the pen. But understanding that plan and putting it into action will require that we show how it will benefit everyone, especially those few who have been benefiting lavishly from money flows for the past 40 or 50 years. Our plan must be comprehensive by showing its many facets beyond the economic elements. We will therefore cover many related topics in this book that overlap into a wide swath of our economic life, our social life, our history, our future, our belief systems, and most important of all, our methodology. We will invoke critical thinking first taught by Socrates and then updated by the Scientific Method. We will seek those ends by drawing from about 100 essays that circumscribe the many elements of how we think, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate facts, and draw limited conclusions that are accurate, reliable, and useful to a very specific purpose. We must be prepared to confront all naysayers with facts, plans, and a vision.

Let’s start with facts about free markets and capitalism.

Do you believe in capitalism? As an economist, I’d like to, but I don’t. I have full faith in the free markets envisioned by Adam Smith, with a lot of competition, low prices, good jobs, safe work places, fair pay, good health care, and prosperity for all. Instead, we have weak, greedy, law makers who control wealth so that it flows into their own or their benefactor’s pockets. Instead of a self-correcting economy, we have too many mergers and acquisitions, too many conglomerates, too much price fixing via vertical integration; too much collusion by legislators; thievery on a large scale, and too many legislative bodies who are controlled by the ultra-wealthy, who hate you if you are positioned anywhere above the center of the ability-to-think curve. Among the ultra wealthy, there is the added factor of an “old boys’ network,” which is analogous to a harem rampant with profligate in-breeding.

What happened to free markets? The answer is they are being held hostage by greed, power, and arrogance. And the consequences are irrefutable: The top 10 percent now own $135 trillion of all our wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold almost zero. All those in the bottom 50 percent are also paid far below a fair living wage. They therefore cannot afford adequate health care, education costs, transportation, food, or fuel; not even a vacation or a night out at a restaurant. Instead, huge amounts of new income and wealth flow automatically to the ultra-wealthy leaving nothing left for those who actually do most of the work in creating both incomes and wealth.

Two huge wealth and income gaps are only getting worse as more and more wealth is being sucked out of the economy and deposited into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. There is no way out of this mess until and unless a lot more of us become enlightened about the problem, and motivated to change it for the better. This book is my last contribution to that cause. My days on left Earth are numbered (with small numerals). I refuse to die until many more are brought under the canopy of prosperity.

I will stand with those creative minds bequeathed to us from such enlightened luminaries as Newton, Einstein, Shakespeare, Jefferson, Michael Farraday, Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine, Annie Besant, Carl Sagan, Emma Goldman, David Hume, Adam Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Lazarus, Eleanore Roosevelt, and Neil de Grasse Tyson. Also from brilliant and knowledgeable economists Paul Krugman and Robert Reich. Other cultures have their creative and brilliant thinkers. There are many thousands more who embrace excellence and creativity in virtually all they do, who would never bow down to or endorse a closed-minded ideologue.

How are such dismal distributional outcomes possible in the richest country on Earth? The answers have been obfuscated and carefully hidden by who those who neither love nor endorse freedom and fair play. They resurrected their efforts back in the 1970s, and the dual inequality chasms have gotten much worse since then.

The Problem:

1. Today, 98 percent of all wealth ultimately transfers from decedents to their living offspring within families, unearned and untaxed. (US Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Reports).

2. Also, 90 percent of all new wealth flows to the holders of present wealth (stocks, bonds, and real estate) via dividends, interest, rents, and capital gains). Wealth from 1950 until now compounded at an average growth rate of 7.2 percent per year, based on its high correlation with GDP growth rates. For an easy reference, all wealth doubles in value every 10 years. The actual wealth gap between rich and poor in 50 years will be 32 times worse than it is today. The quick math is this: Our annual wealth growth rate in the past 50 years projected forward is 1.072^50 = 32.34. That number means that wealth inequality in the US gets 32 times worse every 50 years. And 90 percent of it is mandated by law to fall into the accounts of the wealthiest. The bottom 50 percent who have no wealth will never see a change without our help. Why? 0 times 32.34 = zero.

3. Our Federal Reserve aids and abets the dual inequalities by feeding new money into our commercial banking system knowing in advance that 70 percent of all new money will find its way into the personal wealth accounts of the wealthiest men and women in the US. Note: The Fed employs nerly 400 PhD economists. Those 400 all know about the inequality gaps, why they exist, who benefits, and who loses. Why are they doing so little to improve matters? Perhaps they believe they are protecting their jobs by “going along to get along.”

4. As long as there is a majority of closed-minded ideologues in any of our legislatures, we will see a continuation and a degradation in the wealth and income inequalities in the US. So, who controls the closed-minded legislatures? Today there are 840 billionaires in the US, and more than 2,000 more around the world. A few of them mean well, but I do not know of any in that group who stands out as an intellectual, or a free-thinker, or a genuine philanthropist. Perhaps it is because intellectuals and free thinkers and others who care are driven by the words of Horace Mann who challenged us back in 1859.

The Solution: The solution to this long-festering issue has three parts.

A. Tax Fairness. The underlying logic to tax fairness is that money in circulation creates GDP, profits, wages, tax revenues, and prosperity. Money in wealth accounts benefits only the holders of that wealth. It does not circulate, therefore, it creates wealth for the few, but at the expense of poverty for the many. Indeed, all the elements of poverty are created by wealth diversions to the ultra-wealthy. Those elements are hunger, crime, incarcerations, illiteracy, teen pregancies, drug usage, mental illnesses, shortened life expectancies, and social immobility.

1) The US needs to return to the pre-2000 year inheritance tax schedule. Make the first $10 million to each recipient tax-free. Tax all amounts above $10 million at their former rates.

2) The wealthy must pay their fair share of taxes regardless of how, where, or why they received it. This includes money flows to the ultra rich received in lieu of wages or from any other source defined by laws. That includes income from overseas incomes, as well as from assets held in private accounts anywhere around the world. 

3) Limit all contributions to private foundations to no more than 10 percent of incomes (down from 30 percent).

B. Copy or high-lite this paragraph. This is how free markets are meant to work. We need to direct the Fed to assure much higher amounts of new money flows to credit unions rather than to commercial banks. Credit unions now lend 70 percent of their funds to small businesses and to individuals. Each new lendable dollar will accelerate growth in new and small business loans for expansions, the creation of new businesses, and to lots more competition—the lifeblood of a Free Market system.

C. Adopt the MIT Living Wage scales. Direct the Fed to oversee the implementation of the MIT Living Wage scales. These scales are unique to each county in the US (all 3006 of them). They range from $75,000 per year per househols in poorer states, to $125,000 per year in wealthier states. (see LivingWage.MIT.edu).

Continuing Efforts. The results would be on-going, and they would need to be long-lasting. It might take 10 to 20 years to fully implement them so that our dual inequality gaps would shrink and their growth rates would slow, while growth in the very small and presently non-existent wealth accounts could grow. With new money inflows, our GDP would rise faster and higher, unemployment would drop, we would attract immigrants with entrepreneurial skills, new business start-ups would flourish, present businesses would expand, while older businesses that could not compete with more or better products and/or services would fold—just the way Adam Smith predicted. These measures are needed to begin sharing the wealth, better stated as Prosperity for All.

Here is a very important message to keep in mind: All changes proposed in these pages that would create new and higher incomes and wealth would not come from taking from the rich and giving to the poor, nor from higher taxes on anyone. They would be the result of adding new money into the economy via M1 (money in circulation) by directing that money into new channels, thus creating more GDP, higher profits, higher wages, more tax revenues, and more prosperity for all.

I could end this book here, and it would contain virtually every statement about the problem, and how to fix it. But I have already done that perhaps 100 times in the past. Besides, great thinkers and doers like Socrates, Plato, Tesla, Newton, Einstein, Carl Sagan, Elanore Roosevelt, and Neil deGrasse Tyson all have made and are continuing to make their contributions to humanity, yet the wealthiest country in the world still has the festering issues of immense inequalities of income and wealth that are causing problems as well as proving to be immune to solutions. How do you fix greed, power, and ignorance?

Do not fear that you (readers from any country) do not thoroughly understand one or more of these steps. Each will be presented again and again throughout this book in slightly different ways. Understanding the final results starts with understanding the methods that can get us there. You will need to search your souls to become part of the solution.

Good reading, and good luck.