Economic Justice

A worker earning the federal minimum wage in 2026 cannot afford rent on a one-bedroom anywhere in this district. The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. In real terms, it has lost over 30% of its value. If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity since the 1960s, it would be over $25 an hour today.

We need to raise the federal minimum wage to a real living wage and tie it to a regional cost-of-living index that updates automatically. We need to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers, for workers with disabilities, and for workers in agricultural jobs that have been excluded from labor protections since the 1930s for reasons that everyone who knows the history understands and that no one will say out loud.

Raising the floor is not about charity. It is about whether the people doing the actual work of running this country can afford to live in it.

Every right that workers have today, from the eight-hour day to workplace safety standards, exists because workers organized for it. The dismantling of those protections over the last fifty years was not an accident. It was a deliberate political project funded by the same corporate interests that benefit from cheap labor and unaccountable management.

We need to pass the PRO Act and end the legal weapons corporations use to break unions. We need labor law violations to be actually painful, with penalties that scale with company size rather than the trivial fines that current enforcement uses. We need to ban mandatory arbitration agreements that force workers to give up their right to sue when their rights are violated. We need to end at-will employment in cases of suspected discrimination or retaliation. And we need to extend labor protections to gig workers, domestic workers, and farm workers who have been systematically excluded.

The same CEOs who told their workers there was no money for raises pulled an average of $24 million each in 2023. The pay ratio between CEOs and median workers at S&P 500 companies is now over 270 to 1. In the 1960s it was around 20 to 1. This is not because CEOs got 13 times better at their jobs.

Most executive compensation is structured as stock and options, not salary. The income tax code treats this favorably. Capital gains are taxed at lower rates than wages. When a CEO exercises a stock option or sells shares the board granted them, they pay less in tax on the proceeds than the people working under them pay on their salaries. The whole architecture is engineered to make executive compensation look like investment income rather than what it actually is, which is pay for labor.

We need to tax executive compensation at the same rates as wages, regardless of whether it is paid in cash, stock, or options. We need to close the carried-interest loophole that lets fund managers pay capital gains rates on what is functionally compensation for labor. We need to require that any tax preference granted to executive stock-based compensation be conditioned on broad-based stock ownership for the workers at the same company. And we need a hard cap on the deductibility of executive compensation, so corporations stop being able to write off seven-figure CEO bonuses against their taxes.

The American economy is increasingly being shaped by inherited wealth rather than earned wealth. Billionaire heirs use a small set of legal instruments to pass wealth across generations without paying meaningful tax. Dynasty trusts in particular were enabled by a series of state-level rule changes that quietly repealed the centuries-old common-law restriction against perpetual trusts. The result is that wealth can now compound for hundreds of years inside a tax-advantaged vehicle, paying out to descendants who did not earn it and contribute nothing back to the country that made it possible.

We need to end the federal tax preference for dynasty trusts. We need to apply a generation-skipping transfer tax that actually catches the structures that have been engineered to avoid it. We need to close the grantor-retained annuity trust loophole, the intentionally defective grantor trust loophole, and the rest of the alphabet soup that estate-planning lawyers use to move billions of dollars across generations without it touching the tax base. We need to lower the estate tax exemption from its current historically high level back to something that reflects the original intent of the tax.

A democracy cannot function as a hereditary aristocracy. We are getting closer to one every year.

A wage worker in this district pays federal income tax every two weeks, on time, no exceptions. A billionaire shareholder can avoid federal income tax for years at a time, legally, by holding appreciated assets without selling them and borrowing against them when they need cash. This is not a loophole. This is the design.

We need a wealth tax on net worth above a high threshold, structured carefully to address the constitutional and administrative challenges that critics use to dismiss the idea. We need a true minimum tax on the highest earners, calculated on income that includes unrealized capital gains, with a payment timeline that does not allow indefinite deferral. We need to fund the IRS adequately so it can audit complex high-end returns, which has not been the case for over a decade. And we need to end the step-up basis at death, the single largest loophole in the federal tax code, which allows accumulated gains across a lifetime to disappear from the tax base when someone dies.

Stock buybacks were illegal until 1982. The SEC reclassified them and unleashed an enormous mechanism for transferring corporate cash flow to shareholders rather than reinvesting in workers, R&D, or capacity. Buybacks now run into the trillions of dollars per year. The same companies that received tax cuts on the promise of business investment used most of the windfall to buy back their own stock.

We need to restrict stock buybacks, especially when a company has laid off workers in the same fiscal year, has received public subsidies, or has unfunded pension obligations. We need to raise the corporate income tax rate back toward historical norms and close the offshore loopholes that let multinationals declare profits in tax havens while doing actual business in the United States. And we need to make corporate criminal penalties paid by the executives who made the decisions, not just by the shareholders who get diluted when the corporation pays a fine.