The Challenge

Over the past 45 years, practically all economic gains in the United States have gone to top earners, bypassing everyday workers and leaving the wages of most Americans flat. 

Stagnant pay has lowered living standards, increased reliance on public assistance, weakened economic growth, and fueled a powerful political backlash.

Reconnecting wages and growth is a central challenge of our time. 

A Solvable Problem

While wage inequality is partly driven by seismic forces that are hard to control, like globalization and automation, the compensation practices voluntarily adopted by businesses play a central role in this story—and offer a powerful leverage point for reform.

By incentivizing companies to share the fruits of growth more broadly via changes in public policy, including through the tax code, and taking other steps to prod companies to increase wages, we can restore the American Dream of rising pay and incomes for all.  

The Project to Raise America's Pay (RAMP) is a campaign to reinvent how businesses compensate their workers in ways that align with the core American values of freedom and equality. Our work involves new research and data, creative new policy solutions, and collaboration with public, private, and nonprofit partners.

Decades of stagnant pay have to come to pose fundamental threat to the well-being and stability of U.S. society. The good news? This is a solvable problem. 

Here’s the Solution

The proposal to Raise America’s Pay, or RAMP, is transformative because it induces businesses to change their practices in a manner that reconnects wage growth for the bottom 90% of working Americans with the growth of businesses and the American economy. RAMP overcomes the disconnect that has persisted for nearly a half century between the economy’s growth and wage growth. The graph below shows how projections for compensation increases resulting from reconnecting wage and economic growth through RAMP tower over the Congressional Budget Office’s projected increases for the next 15 years as well as the economy’s actual wage growth performance over the past 15 years, from 2004-2008.

The next graph shows the projected net impact of RAMP on compensation growth for the bottom 90 percent of working Americans compared to five other major proposals. The five alternative proposals are:  a phased increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour over five years; a $1.5 trillion infrastructure program lasting six years; a tripling of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) over five years; a program to increase access to higher education that improves levels of graduation by 25% from both two-year and four-year higher education institutions; and an eight-year program that eliminates the downward wage effect of firms’ oligopolist market power.  RAMP’s reconnection of compensation with business and the economy’s growth is transformative in delivering increased pay that dwarfs all the other proposals.

RAMP is able to bring an end to wage stagnation; no other program does that or comes even close.