The Case for a Maximum Wage

Modern societies set limits, on everything from how fast motorists can drive to how much waste factory owners can dump in our rivers. But incomes in our deeply unequal world have no limits. Could capping top incomes tackle rising inequality more effectively than conventional approaches?

In this engaging book, leading analyst Sam Pizzigati details how egalitarians worldwide are demonstrating that a “maximum wage” could be both economically viable and politically practical. He shows how, building on local initiatives, governments could use their tax systems to enforce fair income ratios across the board.

The ultimate goal? That ought to be, Pizzigati argues, a world without a super rich. He explains why we need to create that world — and how we could speed its creation.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction/ Moderation in All Things, Even Income
• 1/ Defining Excess
• 2/ The Magic of Maximum Multiples
• 3/ A Society without a Super Rich
• 4/ Pipe Dream or Politically Practical Project?
• 5/ Evolving toward Equity
• Notes

“Sam Pizzigati brilliantly explains how high taxation of the very rich dissuaded them from exploiting the rest of us so much in the past, how we lost that protection, and what we need to do to win it back today. A work of genius.”
Danny Dorling, University of Oxford

“Pizzigati raises an urgent question: How long can we endure the burden of the super rich, who suppress the wages of the majority, drive up the costs of everything, and concentrate political power in their own hands? Fortunately he has an answer, and it cries out for enactment.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed Sam Pizzigati is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of Inequality.org.