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ates as well as dropouts - without the education they need to lead productive lives in society. In the long-term, it costs far more to neglect them than it would cost to help these students develop to their full potential.
Publicly funded research and development is essential to both the economy and our quality of life. The revolution in information technology at the end of the last century was spawned by government- sponsored projects. It is clear already that this new century will be the Century of the Life Sciences, with a legion of breakthroughs made possible by research funded by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. Research in areas such as the human genome has not only opened new health care horizons, it is creating substantial new employment opportunities across the country. We must continue to invest in the future.
America is facing an infrastructure crisis. By funding more of those building projects now, we get a double benefit - more efficient facilities and well-paying jobs. For example, every billion dollars invested in highway construction produces 47,500 jobs. That can have a big impact on the economy in a hurry.
It is imperative to provide a stable financial foundation for the federal government if we are to effectively address the pressing economic, educational, and health needs of the people. None of these important government initiatives can be accomplished with inadequate resources. They surely cannot be undertaken on the incredibly shrinking tax base that is the legacy of the Bush Administration. Federal revenues are now at the lowest percentage of gross domestic product since 1950. The tax rates on the top income brackets must be returned to pre-2001 levels, and a new higher bracket - about 45% -- should be created for incomes over one million dollars. In addition, we know that major revenue losses result each year from the exploitation of corporate tax loopholes. Those loopholes must be closed. The changes I am proposing will affect only a small percentage of the wealthiest taxpayers. By restoring greater progressivity to the tax code, we will actually be able to reduce the tax burden on millions of hard-working families with modest incomes, as well as fund the public investments the nation so desperately needs.
Our Republican colleagues will no doubt claim that higher taxes on the wealthy will stifle economic growth. I remember Senator Phil Gramm saying in 1993 that the Clinton tax bill would cause the greatest recession since the Great Depression. His crystal ball was certainly fogged. Under President Clinton, we created 22 million new jobs, and notwithstanding the higher taxes, the rich actually grew richer in the 1990s. The marginal tax rates on high incomes that I would favor would still be far lower than the marginal rates in effect during the most economically productive decades of the last century. Republicans love to quote President Kennedy on cutting taxes, but as I remind them, the top tax bracket on his Inaugural Day was 91 percent.
We should also be prepared to look beyond the taxpayers for new sources of investment in infrastructure. And in this, too, government has an important and productive role.
At least a small portion of the trillions of dollars in pension funds could be invested in public projects. If just five percent of the nation's pension funds were invested, at competitive rates, directly in job-creating and economy-building activities, more than $300 billion in assets could be made available, in a manner consistent with both the security and growth of the pension funds.
Second, we must also assure greater job security for working men and women and their families in this age of rapid global economic change.
Workers today have less job security than most workers had in years past. In this economy with its churning labor market, security comes not through the guarantee of the same job throughout your career, but through the ability to find a new job with at least comparable salary and benefits if you lose your old job.
One of the most disturbing facts about the current jobless recovery is that today's new jobs pay $8,000 less on average than the jobs being lost. Today's workers are working harder for less. We have a serious problem not only with the quantity of available jobs, but with the quality as well.
In the manufacturing sector, as I noted earlier, technology and outsourcing are eliminating an increasing number of well- paid, high-skill jobs. Recently, outsourcing has begun to take away quality jobs in the service sector as well. From computer engineers to financial analysts to radiologists, highly trained workers are seeing more and more of their jobs moving abroad.
When the only jobs disappearing were relatively low-skilled and low-paid, education and job training seemed to offer the solution. Give laid off workers a new skill and they will find better jobs than the ones they lost. Now however, when large numbers of high-skill jobs are disappearing, retraining alone is no longer a sufficient answer. Education is still the single most important element in obtaining a job with a future, and America needs to put substantially more resources into preparing workers for new careers.
But, we must also address the direct causes of the large scale job loss in recent years. Currently, the corporate income tax subsidizes the installation of new technology to replace workers, but it does far less to encourage companies to upgrade
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