Economic Dignity
Ten Articles for an Economy of the People
A REPUBLIC IS NOT FREE if its people are not. A citizen who cannot afford a doctor, who works full time and still cannot make rent, who is one illness or one layoff from ruin, is not a free citizen — he is a dependent one, and a nation of dependents is easily ruled. The equal vote we demand elsewhere means little if, on the day after the election, the same handful of hands still holds the purse, the payroll, and the price of everything.
We have been here before, and we know what to call it. In 1892 the farmers of the People's Party met at Omaha and declared that the fruits of the toil of millions were being boldly stolen to build colossal fortunes for a few. In 1944 Franklin Roosevelt told the nation that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security, and called for a Second Bill of Rights. We stand in that lineage — the long American tradition that says an economy is judged not by the fortunes at its summit but by the security of the family at its base.
Today the wealthiest one percent of Americans hold about as much wealth as the entire bottom ninety percent combined, while the bottom half of the country holds barely two and a half percent of it. The federal minimum wage has sat frozen at $7.25 since 2009 — the longest freeze since the wage was born in 1938. This did not fall from the sky. It was legislated, and it can be legislated away.
Therefore we set down these ten Articles for the common wealth — the wealth a people build together and have every right to share in. Each is a demand, and each is a promise: that in America, an honest week's work will buy an honest life.
A Living Wage for a Day's Work
Raise the federal minimum wage to a true living wage and index it forever after to the cost of living, so no one who works full time in the richest nation on earth lives in poverty. The floor has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 while rent, groceries, and medicine climbed without pause; twenty states still bind their workers to that figure. A wage that has not moved in over fifteen years is not a floor — it is a trapdoor. Work should lift a family out of poverty, not leave it there.
A Fair Share from the Top
Make the largest corporations and the wealthiest households pay their fair share. Tax income from wealth at the same rate as income from work, close the loopholes that let billion-dollar fortunes go untaxed for a lifetime, set a real floor under corporate taxation so profitable giants cannot pay nothing, and enact a tax on the greatest concentrations of wealth. When the top one percent holds nearly a third of everything the nation owns, asking them to pay as their grandparents did is not radical — it is overdue.
An Honest and Simple Tax Code
Simplify the tax code and end the maze of carve-outs written by and for those who can afford the lawyers to exploit them. Most families should be able to file for free, in minutes, on a return the government has already filled out. The code is not complicated by accident; every needless page is a door held open for someone with the means to walk through it. A tax system the average citizen cannot understand is a tax system built to be gamed.
Health Care as a Right, Not a Privilege
Guarantee every American access to health care and break the chain that binds coverage to a paycheck. No family should be bankrupted by an illness, and no worker should stay trapped in a job for fear of losing the care that keeps a child alive. Medical debt is the cruelest debt of all — owed not for luxury but for survival. A nation that lets its people go untreated to protect a middleman's margin has confused a marketplace for a moral order.
Break Up the Monopolies
Revive the antitrust tradition of Roosevelt and the trust-busters and break up the concentrations of corporate power that raise prices, crush wages, and swallow competitors and communities whole. When a handful of firms controls what you eat, where you shop, and what you pay, the free market is neither free nor a market. Competition is the people's check on private power. Restore it.
The Right to Organize
Protect and expand the right of every worker to join a union and bargain collectively, and end the war of attrition waged against organized labor. A single worker across the table from a corporation has no power; a united workforce has plenty. Every gain the middle class ever won — the weekend, the pension, the eight-hour day — was won at that table. The surest path to a fair wage is the freedom to demand one together.
Freedom from Predatory Debt
Relieve the crushing burden of medical and student debt, and cap the usurious interest and predatory lending that turn a hard month into a lifetime of arrears. A young person should not mortgage their future for an education, and no one should pay triple for the sin of being poor when money was short. Debt has become the modern chain — quiet, legal, and inescapable. Strike it off.
A Home Within Reach
Treat housing as the foundation of a stable life rather than a speculative asset to be flipped and hoarded. Build the homes the country is missing, protect tenants from gouging and eviction, and curb the Wall Street firms buying up whole neighborhoods to rent them back at a premium. A roof is not a luxury good. When shelter becomes a casino chip, families become the stakes.
Security in Old Age and in Care
Protect and strengthen Social Security, and build the care economy this century demands — paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and dignity for those who do the work of caring. No one should labor for fifty years and retire into poverty, and no parent should choose between a paycheck and a newborn. A society reveals itself in how it treats its oldest and its youngest. Ours can do far better.
Make the Corporation Serve the Country
Rein in the financial engineering that enriches executives while hollowing out the firms they run. Curb the stock buybacks that reward shareholders instead of workers, place a small tax on high-speed financial speculation, and give workers a real voice in the companies their labor sustains. A corporation is a charter granted by the public and it owes the public something in return. Profit is not a permission slip to abandon the country that made it possible.
None of this is charity, and none of it is new. It is the unfinished business of every generation that ever looked at a rigged economy and refused to call it fate. The fortunes at the top were built on the common labor of us all, and the common wealth belongs, by right, to the people who made it.
Pick up the pitchfork. The equal vote and the fair share are the same fight — one wins you a voice, the other wins you a life. We mean to win both.
Pitchfork Democracy — We The People