Copyright © 2025 by Chuck Collins. This excerpt originally appeared in Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
Examples of rule changes that would lift people out of poverty, increase economic security for the precarious, and reduce inequality include the following:
Raise the Minimum Wage to a Living Wage
The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009, lagging inflation in basic living expenses in housing, health care, food, transportation, and childcare. Because of the rise in the cost of living, the current federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) has nearly 50 percent less buying power than it had when it was last raised in 2009. According to the Consumer Price Index, $7.25 in 2009 is roughly $10.61 in today’s dollars. The minimum wage for restaurant servers who receive tips has been stuck at $2.13 an hour since 1991.
Provide True Universal Health Care
Our aim should be to expand health coverage so that every child and adult gets good basic health care—and so that no one is allowed to become sick, become destitute, or die because of lack of health care. The Affordable Care Act, now under threat of erosion, was a step toward universal coverage, increasing the number of those with health care by 20 million.
But more than 26 million people, or 8 percent of the U.S. population, still lack coverage, primarily because of cost. We need to work toward a system of “Medicare for all” or at least a publicly financed option for providing health care.
Strengthen the Right to Organize and Basic Labor Standards and Protections
Ensuring basic worker rights and standards can lift the bottom 40 percent of workers who are currently the most exploited and disadvantaged. The labor movement is advocating for strengthening the right to organize a union.
Ensuring that every worker has a forty-hour workweek (or overtime pay), minimum paid vacation time, paid family medical and sick leave, and protections against wage theft would make life more humane and equal for everyone.
And on the business side, improving people’s lives would of course increase productivity.
Provide Access to Lifelong Learning and Job Retraining
Quality education, and the opportunity to continue education through one’s lifetime, should be accessible to all. Especially in a global economy undergoing significant technological transitions, workers need to be able to reskill to keep their jobs or get new ones.
Provide Refundable Tax Credits and a Guaranteed Minimum Income (or Universal Basic Income)
One way to ensure a secure income floor is to pay out a minimum income to supplement low wages. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit—by many accounts, the most effective and easy way to administer an anti-poverty program in the United States—would be relatively simple. There are dozens of pilots in the United States and around the world exploring the impact of a guaranteed income and other social welfare guarantees.
Provide Government Employment as Last Resort
A key policy that honors the dignity and importance of work is making the public sector an employer of last resort for those who cannot find a job in the private sector. Like the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s Great Depression, the government should identify useful work that the private sector is not doing—and pay unemployed or underemployed Americans decent wages to do it. Like many public expenditures, this could be paid for through budget allocations or a dedicated tax. Such projects could accompany investments in crumbling infrastructure and climate resilience projects.
Furnish Adequate Welfare Support
Those kept from working by disability, mental or physical illness, or age need a social welfare safety net composed of many of the services described previously. Currently, disability benefits are greatly inadequate and consign many to a life of poverty. In addition, a better safety net could help some return to the paid labor force by stabilizing their housing, health, and care tasks.
Policies that raise the floor not only reduce poverty and economic deprivation; they also reduce economic insecurity and stress throughout society. Until stricken ourselves, we greatly underestimate how easily and rapidly job loss, divorce, or major illness can lead to destitution, homelessness, and death—and how many Americans have experienced such instability.
