Introduction

Over the past 45 years, practically all income 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, eroded confidence in public institutions, and fueled a powerful political backlash. Even as most workers have experienced anemic wage growth, neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties have dealt with the problem for five decades. Reversing wage stagnation and ensuring more broadly shared prosperity is a central challenge of our time.

The good news? This is a solvable problem. While wage inequality is partly driven by seismic forces that are hard to control, like globalization and automation, the choices made by businesses play a central role in this story. For decades now, businesses have directed a disproportionate share of gains in earnings to management as well as to owners and shareholders. Workers have been receiving a sharply shrinking share of a growing pie over the past half century.

Raise America's Pay (RAMP) is a plan to incentivize businesses to make different choices. It would dramatically boost the wages of U.S. workers by tying net corporate taxes to whether companies share earnings equitably with their workers.

This paper makes the case for bolder action to reverse decades of wage stagnation, outlines how RAMP would work, and looks at the plan’s projected effects.

Wage Stagnation and Its Effects

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of America’s pay gap. GDP and productivity per worker have both doubled over the past 45 years in the United States. At the same time, real pay to employees at the top of the income ladder escalated by 130 percent and companies boosted their profits by a staggering 200 percent. Yet average real pay for the nation’s production and nonsupervisory workers—representing 75 percent of the American labor force—budged barely at all, increasing by a mere 12 percent. In sum, the economy’s growth has become disconnected from the compensation going to America’s everyday workers.

More specifically, the share of total compensation and profits in the private sector going to the bottom 90% of workers has dropped from 61.8% to 48.5% over the past 45 years.  As a result, the typical working family today receives almost $25,000 a year less in wages, giving up more than $400,000 cumulatively over the 45 years as a total of $30 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90% of employees to top earners and to profits in the process.

Today’s lopsided compensation practices stem partly from structural changes in the economy, including automation and globalization. Even so, businesses retain much leeway in how to allocate their winnings. Businesses in exactly the same industry often allocate quite different shares of their earnings to labor. Yet despite that, the norm for decades now has been for many businesses to choose to direct a disproportionate share of gains in earnings to management as well as increased profits going to owners and shareholders.

This fundamental shift in how the economy works has had myriad negative effects on U.S. society.

Economically, there’s now a substantial body of evidence that the failure of businesses to share their earnings more broadly with middle and working-class employees operates as a substantial drag on growth. The reason here is hardly a mystery, and points to a truth that Henry Ford understood a century ago: A strong economy depends upon ordinary people having enough income to buy consumer goods, services, and homes.

It should be equally obvious why chronic wage stagnation affecting so many working Americans would be damaging to the fiscal health of federal, state, and local government. People just scraping by not only pay less in taxes but make much greater use of public assistance. Studies show that large numbers of workers at low-wage companies like Walmart and McDonalds rely on SNAP, Medicaid, and other assistance programs. Many low-wage workers also make use of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit years. Through these and other programs, government is effectively providing tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to low-wage employers.

Finally, the negative political effects of wage stagnation have become starkly clear in recent years, especially with the populist explosion in 2016 and thereafter. Many Americans believe, and rightly so, that the wealthy, the professional class, and corporations have been the main beneficiaries of recent economic growth while ordinary people have been left behind. People are angry and they’re also scared, given the precarious predicament of so many households. Surveys show that 40 percent of Americans would cover a $400 emergency by either borrowing or selling an asset—to cite just one indicator of how squeezed many people are today.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump was skilled at tapping into that anger. He claimed that unfair global trade and immigration hurt workers badly and promised to limit and restrict them both. He pledged to roll back taxes and regulations in order to expand higher-paying employment in manufacturing, energy, and other sectors and so get wages moving again. His fiery calls for economic protection and renewal resonated with many voters, not just in Midwestern states hit hard by deindustrialization but also in other parts of the U.S. with faltering economies, and helped secure his victory through the Electoral College.

In turn, Trump’s erratic and damaging tenure in office has underscored the dangers that his chaotic version of populism can pose to political and even economic stability. One clear take away from his rise is that when ordinary Americans are largely excluded from the nation’s prosperity over prolonged periods, bad things are likely to happen—a lesson that has deep roots in history. As the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer wrote in a widely read 2014 essay in Politico: “No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.”

A recent statement by 181 member CEOs of the Business Roundtable (including those from AT&T, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, and General Motors) demonstrates a growing awareness by business of the seriousness of the stakes. They have called upon American businesses to not only look at fairer compensation and increased benefits for all employees but also a refreshing new focus on sustainable business practices and stakeholder value, not just earnings per share.

So, how have President Trump’s policies fared in attacking stagnant wages and stalled economic mobility for rank and file workers? Despite the President’s daily claims of headline job creation, soaring stock markets, record unemployment, and rising nominal wage increases, wage stagnation has continued apace in the lives of everyday working Americans. Gold-standard data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that growth in real (after inflation) hourly earnings for our production and nonsupervisory workers, also known as rank-and-file working Americans, has risen during President Trump’s first three years at an annual rate of 0.9% as compared to 1.3% annually during Obama’s final term in office.  America’s production and nonsupervisory workers make up more than three-quarters of the private-sector labor force, or nearly 110 million workers. It’s not just that wage stagnation has persisted, but the Trump administration’s record for everyday workers’ wages would have been even worse had many states and localities not raised their own minimum wages. As for the 7 million new jobs added since Trump entered office, job creation has fallen slightly from the Obama years with the trend continuing that about half of new jobs being created by the U.S. economy pay low wages and include few benefits.

Given the persistence of wage stagnation under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, and how even years of strong economic growth fails to translate into pay hikes for most workers, it’s clear that dramatic new thinking is needed to ensure shared prosperity in today’s economy.

A Policy Playbook 

In recent years, decades of rising economic inequality have finally become a major focus of public debate. It’s not only businesses that have begun sounding the alarm. Top Democrats are talking about economic inequality with a forcefulness not seen since the 1930s.

Nonetheless, Democrats are mainly offering a list of programs to deal with the downstream symptoms of chronic low pay that leave the underlying problem itself unresolved. Such policies include major boosts to affordable and universal health-care access, tuition assistance for higher education, and family-leave and child-care. These proposals certainly address urgent problems of low- and middle-income Americans. But, they do little to reverse the problem of chronic flat wages—even though it’s a core underlying driver of the economic hardship experienced by so many households—including even large numbers with college degrees. Wage stagnation is a problem that reaches across divisions of race, class, gender, and geography. 

Democrats do promote some policies that aim directly at improving wages.  Those that deal most explicitly with this topic include raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, strengthening/expanding unions and labor protections, placing workers on corporate boards, ensuring collective bargaining, enhancing skills training to improve productivity, and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. We examine the merits and limitations of many of the Democratic proposals elsewhere but the bottom line is that none of these measures, even in combination, comes close to offering the sustained impact of RAMP at full implementation.

Raising the minimum wage is an important proposal yet would fall far short of achieving a transformational rise in living standards. Even a hike to $15 an hour would boost wages appreciably for less than a quarter of U.S. workers who are suffering the effects of wage stagnation, plus it would be essentially a one-time raise after inflation at final phase-in even for those workers. 

Reforms that enable more workers to join unions and revitalize collective bargaining and worker power have been another core plank of the Democratic Party for decades. If ever implemented, they would surely result in wage gains. However, such gains could take many years to be fully realized given that fewer than 7 percent of private sector employees now belong to a union. And, while essential for many good reasons, strengthening worker power in the economy has had a record of mixed success in other advanced economies as a means of lifting pay sufficiently to defeat wage stagnation.

Likewise, proposals to boost the EITC—also popular among many progressives—would only do so much for U.S. workers. In 2018, the EITC put $63 billion into the pockets of workers—a relative pittance compared to the many hundreds of billions of dollars in additional wages that workers would be receiving a year if business earnings were shared the way they were in previous periods of U.S. history. It’s also important to stress that the EITC doesn’t produce any actual wage increases; instead it provides an income subsidy from government for low-paid workers. In effect, the EITC lets low-wage employers off the hook and expanding this subsidy could well worsen this problem.

Aggressive positioning by Democrats on the menace of widening economic inequality is a welcome development. What’s still missing from this emerging Democratic toolbox, though, are bold new ideas for changing how businesses operate to end a half century of stalled pay and actually deliver substantial pay raises to most workers—both now and over the long-term.

Democrats were the majority party through much of the 20th century in large part because they were able to ensure steadily rising pay and upward mobility for the majority of Americans—a promise that transcended divisions of race, class, geography, and gender; appealing to nearly everyone with a job. It’s no coincidence that the onset of wage stagnation in the 1970s, and the lack of a stronger Democratic response to this problem, coincided with the party’s declining fortunes. Until Democrats have a realistic plan to ensure growing pay and mobility for workers again, they’re likely to continue to struggle politically. It seems almost suicidal for Democrats to go into the 2020 confrontation with Trump without a much stronger proposal for how they’ll help non-college white voters who are skeptical of government but hunger to move upward through work. And, it’s not just these voters who are crucial to deciding the election and likely to be animated by a stronger message on wages. It’s the more than 100 million nonsupervisory workers who’ve been hurt by wage stagnation—voters who come from every demographic group and live in every part of the nation.

If Democrats have no narrative or real solution to stalled wages, many Americans will continue to buy into Trump’s and the Republicans’ message about how to lift workers. That story promises that with lower taxes, less regulation, more capital investment, and—Trump’s addendum—a tougher approach to trade and stricter controls on immigration, the economy will boom and anyone who works hard will see their wages rise. Yet today, with near historic tight labor markets and the economy having experienced solid GDP growth, we see dramatic real-time evidence that these Republican solutions don’t work to defeat wage stagnation and boost workers’ pay. That gives to the nation—Democrats and Republicans alike—an open invitation to push their own fresh story for how to raise wages.

Thinking More Boldly

A key to ensuring wage growth for workers is to steer business, through carrots, sticks, and mutual self-interest, to change how their earnings are divvied up among key stakeholders. While it’s not realistic to expect corporations to upend current compensation patterns overnight, one big step companies could take is to start sharing gains in earnings proportionately with workers going forward. As businesses grow, they could commit to keeping pay for rank-and-file employees as a stable share of total compensation plus profits. 

This simple step, to have wages keep up with growth, may not sound very radical, but its effects would be dramatic over time, even if real GDP growth remains at today’s levels. Our analysis finds that if businesses kept today’s share going to rank-and-file workers stable, it would transform the wage picture—while also safeguarding solid profits for business. Such an approach would lift average real compensation for the bottom 90% of workers at an annual rate four times faster than over the past 15 years (34.6% in 15 years versus about 8.7%), boosting gains in real compensation to a level approaching the iconic 1950s and 1960s. We estimate that the increase in wages for workers, who spend nearly all their income, will also bolster demand by enough to support the creation of as many as 3 million additional jobs by the 10th year.

Judging by the Business Roundtable’s statement in August 2019, some companies may be ready to embrace this practice voluntarily—understanding what’s at stake for the nation. Far-sighted management wants and needs a predictable business environment with lower risk. A future in which workers remain stuck and unable to get ahead creates conditions that slow growth due to constrained demand, potentially destabilizes the economy from excessive consumer borrowing, and leads to feelings of marginalization and anger that produce rising political turmoil and unpredictable policies. A growing number of corporate leaders understand these realities. They can and should be invited to partner in long-overdue changes in compensation practices to ensure more broadly shared prosperity. At the same time, though, many other business leaders will need enticements to change entrenched practices.

A New Metric and New Incentives

The corporate tax system offers an avenue to achieve this key goal, in particular tying net corporate taxes to whether companies share earnings with their workers.

That’s the foundation of Raise America’s Pay (RAMP). The plan offers modest tax incentives to businesses that commit to paying a stable proportion of earnings to the bottom 90 percent of workers as earnings grow, plus those businesses would continue to enjoy all the current tax benefits: both the reduced tax rates and loopholes of the present tax system. Businesses that don’t choose to share gains and increase wages proportionately, by contrast, would not receive a tax incentive and would also forfeit many of the savings they’re receiving under the 2017 Tax Act along with eligibility for a range of loopholes available for corporations. The loss of tax privileges is substantial. While the 2017 Tax Act was supposed to spur economic growth in a way that benefits everyone, that has yet to happen. RAMP would ensure that it does.

What follows is not written in stone but rather is an illustrative example of a specific proposal whose effects we have modelled. It is our belief that a pre-distributive approach, of the kind outlined here, is the most efficient, enduring, and bipartisan method for dealing with stalled wages.

At the center of our proposal is a new metric for wage fairness: the Compensation Ratio, or CR. Using current data that are already available, it’s possible to measure the proportion of a company’s total compensation and profits that goes to paying everyday workers—the bottom 90% of employees in our example, generally those earning less than $100,000 annually. This portion is the company’s CR. Its calculation would be based on a running average, such as five years. In turn, by monitoring the CR, it’s possible to determine how any business is distributing the fruits of annual growth in earnings. With it, we can see clearly within individual industrial sectors which companies are shrinking the share going to everyday workers. This transparency holds the key to policy since declining CRs reflect the root sources of wage stagnation. As we mentioned, the overall average CR has declined steadily in the American economy, from 61.8% to 48.5%, since wage stagnation began around 1973.

At the core of RAMP is the simple proposition that companies should hold their CRs stable over time. When this happens, as growth occurs and more resources become available for compensation and profits, pay for the bottom 90% of workers will automatically rise in similar proportion with pay for the top 10% of workers and profits. Pay will have become rewired to growth. 

Individual CRs would be permitted to vary within narrow parameters. For example, when achieving efficiencies, companies would be allowed exceptions to further lower their CR with the stipulation that a fair portion of the savings from those efficiencies (such as making up half of the difference from the lowered CR) be directed to benefiting on-going as well as laid-off workers. Since nearly all gains from such savings today go to the top and to profits, a new requirement to keep the CR stable in this manner will bring greater equity to the effects that outsourcing, subcontracting, and automation have had in the past. Having to shore up the CR should also operate to restrain the use of such practices when they are undertaken for financial reasons unless they have a promise to deliver above-average financial returns.  Plus, it will induce companies currently taking advantage of occupying monopsonist positions—now an important cause of wage stagnation—to share gains and raise wages for their everyday workers proportionately with profits and pay to top employees.

Joining RAMP would not be mandatory. But, tying net taxes to whether a company stabilizes its CR will give companies powerful incentives to join because of the combination of the tax benefits participating companies would enjoy and the tax penalties they would avoid.  Regarding the benefits, in the proposal we have modeled, most firms agreeing to hold their CR stable would pay lower corporate taxes: they would retain 20 percent of monies due to the IRS under the present system as long as they devote these tax savings to cover the cost of pay raises for its rank-and-file workers.

Due to considerations of equity, however, not all companies would get those benefits. Companies with the lowest CRs in their sectors—the lowest proportions of compensation going to the bottom 90% of workers—would have to finance the raises entirely themselves and would not be eligible for tax benefits. Nevertheless, because of the strength of the tax penalties described below, most such companies are still likely to join and participate in RAMP.

The approach that RAMP takes is efficient in how it leverages tax privileges. It’s true that a minority of companies already share gains in a manner similar to what RAMP calls for. To exclude such companies from receiving a tax redirection would constitute a real inequity. But, even accounting for their inclusion in the program we estimate that the RAMP approach still delivers at least three times more aggregate real wage increases to workers than the tax redirections will cost the government.

How can that be? The reason is that the tax benefits—the carrots offered by RAMP—are accompanied by tax penalties applying to companies that decide to remain outside of RAMP and not share gains with their workers. In the proposal we modelled, companies that don’t commit to keeping their CR stable would lose three-fifths of the savings they gained under the 2017 tax bill and also three-fifths of the tax loopholes those companies have been using. In addition, they would also lose priority for federal contracts, totaling $560 billion in 2018.

A compelling logic justifies these penalties. Current tax law, as well as longstanding tax breaks, are aimed at spurring business behavior that generates growth and prosperity to the benefit of all. Companies that are sharing gains with their workers deserve all the benefits of the current tax system. Companies that instead don’t share their gains with workers, and leave workers out, shouldn’t be receiving the same beneficial treatment under tax law.

Economists are often skeptical that tax incentives can achieve major changes in corporate behavior. That’s understandable, given the long history of changes in tax law that have produced only business as usual by companies. However, our analysis shows that the combination of carrots and sticks under RAMP would indeed have powerful effects on business compensation practices. They would fundamentally change the calculus around raising wages.

We have extensively modeled the likely effects of RAMP looking at a great range of companies across multiple sectors. And what we’ve found, in nearly all cases, is that the net loss of tax benefits an employer would sustain would far exceed the cost of worker raises. The powerful effects of the sticks in RAMP, along with the carrots, would ensure that an employer’s after-tax profits will always be significantly higher if they’re in the RAMP program rather than outside of it. Even after paying higher wages, companies that participate in RAMP will see after-tax profits that average one-fifth higher than if the companies decided not to participate in RAMP, a substantial advantage. The tax penalties account for more than three- quarters of that advantage, and incentives could be made stronger if need be.  Most companies would view a 20% difference in profits, even after paying higher wages, to be a strong reason to join.

Currently, many companies fear that if they embrace high-road wage practices they’ll put themselves at a competitive disadvantage and face the ire of investors. They worry that good guys finish last. RAMP flips that poisonous dynamic; companies that give pay raises that track with growth will do appreciably better than those that do not. Under RAMP, there will always be a significant ‘shareholder value gap’ between the two, favoring the company that shares gains, so in effect transforming “shareholder value” into “stakeholder value” as regards owners and workers. Once again, the great engine of American business will work as it should: pulling everyone along to a more prosperous future.

Today, enhancing profits on the backs of workers is being recognized by many business leaders as a technique that has run its course and is not part of a sustainable business model going forward. By delivering a significant advantage to participating companies in after-tax profits, RAMP is in alignment with this emerging concept of stakeholder value to drive rising wages rather than continuing to feed wage stagnation. 

Compliance and Gaming

To ensure a level playing field for participants, it is critical to institutionalize an effective means to manage compliance and to control potential gaming—means that are automated, tested for their effectiveness, and will minimize the complexity of the regulatory process.

In terms of compliance, all businesses would be eligible to join RAMP, but the tax penalty side would apply only to companies with more than a certain number of workers (our work suggests businesses that are beyond the start-up phase with 20 or more workers). Even though there are hundreds of thousands of such businesses spanning a broad array of different industries, ensuring compliance with RAMP would be relatively straightforward, entailing adding some personnel and automated resources to IRS ranks but not requiring a major new bureaucracy within the federal government.

Administration of the program would occur largely through the normal tax process, and there would be little need for extensive new paperwork. The CR of companies can be monitored mostly from data that firms already report publicly through their W2 forms and audited financial statements.

Of course, it goes without saying that companies may attempt to game the plan. It’s therefore critical that the RAMP program include mechanisms for detecting attempts to get around the rules. Given the vast number of companies that will participate in RAMP, it’s also vital that any surveillance system to deter gaming be automated so it can operate at scale to produce clear, reliable red flags when companies are not in compliance. To minimize the complexity of the regulatory process, such red flags must be grounded in data that inform a transparent certification process.

To this end, the program we’ve designed includes an application capable of detecting gaming (including gaming against various tiers of the bottom 90% of workers) based upon annual reporting of four simple audited metrics available to any employer, metrics which can also be checked against other data that companies report. We’ve extensively modeled and tested this anti-gaming system in tens of thousands of scenarios involving a wide variety of outsourcing and other likely gaming techniques, randomly run. The results indicate that the system succeeds in detecting attempts to game with both a low rate of error and few false positives.

Impacts: A Return to Wage Growth and a Bipartisan Politics of Shared Prosperity

Given their concerns over sustainability of the current corporate model coupled with the large financial impact of the tax incentives/penalties, most companies will join RAMP. In tandem with a higher minimum wage, we estimate that RAMP and its ripple effects will raise pay substantially for more than 100 million U.S. workers across every part of the economy, ending a half century of wage stagnation. In addition, it would do so without recurring political battles to secure government funding—fights that will become all the more bitter as fiscal pressures grow amid the aging of the baby boomers.

More specifically, our analysis projects that average real compensation for workers in RAMP will increase by more than $11,500 a year in today’s dollars over ten years, a typical working family’s by about $18,000, with businesses retaining solid profits.  The compensation gains are substantial, far beyond those of any other proposal. They raise the average by about 26% in those ten years, and approximately 35% in 15 years, a rate of growth four times greater than the growth workers have experienced over the past 15 years. Such pay hikes would begin to resemble the wage picture of the good old days of the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, the stronger wage increases that prior gains in production and revenues deliver can be expected to boost consumer demand sufficiently to support the creation of about 3 million new jobs by the tenth year.

We envision RAMP as working in tandem with other policy measures to spur shared prosperity. Already, state and local minimum wages are compelling companies to raise wages. Our modelling for RAMP assumes increases in the federal minimum wage in stages to $12.50 per hour and then to $15 per hour within six years. (It delivers about one-eighth of RAMP’s raise.) RAMP would also complement any number of other proposed measures to improve the position of working Americans, including an expanded EITC, paid family leave, and subsidized childcare.

Simultaneously, RAMP’s broad-gauged pay increases should reduce federal spending on assistance programs, ranging from food stamps to the ACA and Medicaid. And the combination of reduced federal assistance, increased wages, and added jobs from boosted consumer demand should help improve the fiscal position of the federal government, exceeding the cost of the tax redirections.  RAMP is projecting a net cumulative federal fiscal benefit of approximately $500 billion from the program over 10 years.

Restoring the American Dream of upward mobility is likely to have profoundly positive effects as well on the fabric of U.S. society and the nation’s political culture. Workers with steadily rising rather than stagnant wages are likely to have a much stronger faith that the “system” is working fairly. These feelings should help dampen polarization, reduce the appeal of an angry populism, and help restore Americans’ trust in public and private institutions alike.

Neither the Democratic nor Republican party has dealt with wage stagnation for five decades. But democracy is only as strong as its ability to help citizens move ahead in their lives. When that becomes a serious problem for too many, it is a problem for all. The time to confront this challenge is now.

We are optimistic that RAMP can align strong bipartisan support behind a new push to end wage stagnation because it delivers benefits to a wide range of stakeholders and political actors. RAMP offers an appealing win-win-win partnership that joins businesses, workers, and government together to achieve what might be called a “Get-Ahead Economy”. All participants get a series of vital benefits from setting up a collaboration that is real, not aspirational.

Under RAMP, workers will see significant improvements in pay and more upward mobility in an economy made stronger by shared prosperity and increased consumer demand. Unlike more narrowly targeted measures to fight inequality, like raising the minimum wage, RAMP will deliver pay increases to a vast swath of U.S. workers spread in every industry and geographic region, as well as every demographic group.

For businesses, more widely shared wage increases will spur economic growth with commensurate profits, a more productive workforce that higher pay usually delivers, plus a long-term environment with fewer threatening economic, financial, and political risks.

RAMP will also strengthen the public sector. It will reduce the strain on entitlement programs that now support low-income workers—freeing up resources for other critical priorities, like infrastructure investments—and help restore Americans’ belief that government can manage the economy to ensure rising prosperity for all.

Today our political parties have opposing stances that often seem irreconcilable. Yet, the political preoccupations of both the right and the left do have one fundamental thing that brings them together: many of the core concerns of each are made significantly worse by wage stagnation. Resolving wage stagnation will achieve ends dear to both sides of the aisle.

The right is apprehensive about the relentless growth of public assistance and entitlements. Until recently, they also focused on the disturbing growth of the national debt. The left, by contrast, is preoccupied with rising economic inequality, the shrinking middle class, and a desire to reduce poverty. In thinking about these problems, neither side has paid enough attention to the degree to which chronic wage stagnation contributes to all of the concerns or, conversely, the way that causing wages to rise in a sustained manner would remedy each of them.

RAMP should appeal to many on the right because it does not envision a bigger government as the main solution to income inequality. It requires no new taxes or appreciable increase in government bureaucracy because it uses a market-based approach. When fully implemented, it would curtail spending on a wide variety of public assistance programs and strengthen the U.S. government’s long-term fiscal sustainability. 

RAMP should appeal to many on the left as well because it creates sustainable rising wages, reverses widening inequality, and restores upward economic mobility. In addition, it entirely circumvents constraints on new government spending that are projected to grow over time as baby boomers retire and entitlement costs rise. Instead, RAMP is expected to produce a net financial benefit to government that can be used for other purposes and initiatives.

Despite intense levels of political polarization, there is growing concern about economic inequality among Americans from both major parties, as well among many business leaders. The challenge for our elected officials is to embrace bold policy solutions to address this pressing national crisis that can command support from a bipartisan majority of voters and from workers and business leaders alike. We believe RAMP meets that critical test of viability.