Better Jobs, Bigger Paychecks

Americans need a raise. You've earned one.

You produce nearly twice what a worker did in 1979. Your paycheck barely moved. Where did the difference go? Not to you. Since 1975, $79 trillion has moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. The hourly profit and productivity from the American worker has increased steadily – but not the paycheck. In 2023 alone, that transfer was $3.9 trillion—enough to give every worker in the bottom 90% a $32,000 raise. That's your raise – earned, but never paid. And this isn't a left-wing talking point: RAND, a nonpartisan research group, found that 99% of us are worse off for it.

Raise a worker's paycheck, and she spends it at local businesses run by her neighbors. Those businesses hire. Those hires spend. That is not just theory, it is the clear conclusion of the independent studies that tested the impact of raising wages and paychecks. This is the tried-and-true engine that built the American middle class—stable growth driven by the purchasing power of middle and working class families. Cut wages and you cut the fuel. The economy grows from the middle out, not from crumbs trickling down from the top.

Washington has run on the opposite rule for 50 years: when profits get concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, they call it efficiency; when your pay rises, they call it inflation. Every raise gets treated as a hand-out, while private equity pays themselves like they did all the work. Tom would flip that rule and rebuild federal and fiscal policy around one priority – getting working Americans the raise they've earned.