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Sam Pizzigati

Thursday 2nd of October 2025

Income inequality A far simpler and much bolder approach [to reducing income inequality] … would be to set a new income maximum as a multiple of the existing minimum wage Any income above that multiple would face a tax of 100 percent. … A “maximum wage” set in this fashion would immediately intertwine the economic fates of society's poorest and society's most privileged. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality A generation ago, mainstream economists believed that greater equality  fostered dysfunction. Any attempts to restrain income at the top, this mainstream held, would reduce incentives to save and invest and throttle the economic growth necessary to “lift all boats.” But that mainstream has reversed course and now sees inequality as more likely to sink boats than lift them. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality Since 1978. the poorest 50 percent of Americans have seen their real incomes shrink, by 1 percent. By contrast, America's most affluent 1 percent, over that same span, have seen their real incomes nearly triple. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality We can level up incomes at the bottom of our economic order. We can level down incomes at the top. Or we can do both. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Income inequality What if each of our societies set a ceiling on the annual income any one individual could pocket — and linked this maximum to an existing wage minimum? … In any nation that linked minimum to maximum, society's richest would be able to increase their own personal income only if the incomes of society's poorest increased first. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality In the United Kingdom, the United States and around the world, executive compensation has become the locomotive of our contemporary inequality. To “predistribute” wealth more rationally, we would need to slow that engine down. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The richest of the ultra rich, the world's bilionaires, now total over 2000. The least of these billionaires now hold 279,000 times more personal wealth than our planet's typical adult. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality We need to place as much emphasis on the “predistribution” of wealth as its redistribution. We need ot identify the economic institutions and policies that guide excessive rewards to the rich and powerful — and make them over. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com