A Path to $30/hr. by 2030
Click the link to be taken to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator and see why I landed on $30, data based on Union County, NC or you can select the county where you live. https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/37179
Worker and Main-Street friendly.
First - let’s define a living wage. The hourly rate that an individual in a household must earn to support themselves and/or their family, working full-time, or 2080 hours per year. The tables above provide living wage estimates for individuals and households with one or two working adults and zero to three children. In households with two working adults, all hourly values reflect what one working adult requires to earn to meet their families’ basic needs, assuming the other adult also earns the same.
$30 an hour sounds like a lot at first but amounts to $62,400 a year before taxes and falls closer to $45,000 after taxes. The following is a plan that forces large employers to lift pay quickly, protects truly small businesses, and pays for the transition by taxing extraordinary corporate profits and ultra-high personal incomes. Just as the U.S. did in the mid-20th century. Workers get a dated, guaranteed path to $30 by 2030 nationwide. Small businesses keep their doors open with a permanent subsidy so neighborhood diners and repair shops aren’t collateral damage.
Living Wages Help All & How We Get There
More paying customers: When millions move from $12 to $18 or from $20 to $30 an hour, cash registers ring at more places. People have disposable income to spend at diners, auto shops, hardware stores, on childcare, and so much more. Businesses prefer steady volume to coupon-chasing.
Less turnover + higher skill: Better wages cut churn and absenteeism. Training finally sticks; service improves; mistakes fall. Those are direct cost savings that rarely show up on the front end.
Fewer junk costs: Families current on rent and utilities generate fewer collection losses for landlords and power co-ops. Hospitals eat fewer bills. Local governments collect steadier taxes without hiking rates.
Real competition again: When all employers live under the same wage floor, the game shifts from “who can pay the least” to “who can run the best shop”.
1) Wage based on employer size
Large corporations that have captured windfall profits shoulder the burden as they did in the 1950s instead of treating low wages as a business model. If we want higher wages, we need a few things. One is a phased federal wage floor and second a funded transition that helps small and mid-sized employers bridge the gap. Paid for by taxing extreme profits from ultra-wealthy corporations (Top 100) and excessive income from billionaires, not by squeezing workers or Main Street. Goal: a universal $30/hour floor by 2030, with larger firms moving first and small businesses getting breathing room and full support. Tipped & sub-minimum wages: phased out on the same schedule.
Employer size 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030
≥500 employees $20 $24 $27 $29 $30
100–499 $18 $22 $26 $28 $30
20–99 $16 $20 $24 $27 $30
<20 (micro) $16 $19 $22 $26 $30
2) Small business Promise
For employers with fewer than 20 employees, which is over 90% of businesses in the US, the federal government fully subsidizes the wage delta, the difference between a worker’s current rate and the required floor each year with a refundable payroll credit, no sunset. Why permanent? Small businesses can be high-churn, low-margin, and place-based. We want them open and competitive, not priced out by giants. The subsidy makes the policy pro-worker and pro-Main-Street at the same time. How it works automatically via quarterly payroll filings:
Credit = Required wage − Base wage × hours (capped at 1,800/yr). Deposited in near-real time against payroll tax; any excess is refunded.
Guardrails: no eligibility for firms splitting to dodge the 20-employee line; no credit for owners’ own pay above $150,000.
3) Paying For It
Corporate income tax with a 70% top bracket and 21% → 28% base rate for C-corps. Progressive surtax brackets on domestic profits above large thresholds, culminating in a top corporate rate of 70% on extraordinary profits. For example, profits above $10B U.S.-sourced or 15% return on U.S. equity, whichever is greater. Purpose: stop monopoly-style windfalls from financing low pay.
1950-style top personal rates for ultra-incomes that reinstates high marginal brackets on true ultra-income, 70%–90% marginal rates above $50 to $100M in annual taxable income.
Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Close the step-up loophole; equalize capital and labor rates at the top.
Excess-profits which leads to a 10% surtax on current pre-tax profits above 125% of firms’ 2018–2019 inflation-adjusted average which are the “normal profits” benchmark ore-Covid. Prevents price-gouging cycles from funding low wages and buybacks.
Buyback & distribution brakes which raise the buyback excise from 1% to 4%. No buybacks or special dividends for firms that fail to hit the wage schedule; violations trigger loss of deductions and penalty surtax. Together, these measures recreate the mid-century social contract: strong profits are fine, but society comes first—and windfalls don’t come tax-free while workers struggle.
4) Anti-avoidance Crackdown
Aggregation rules: Headcount and profits are calculated across commonly controlled entities - parent or corporate subsidiary, sister company, P/E roll-ups. Splitting a firm to duck a bracket triggers joint liability and a 3× penalty. U.S. nexus: Large multinationals compute the wage floor on U.S. payroll and the tax brackets on U.S.-sourced profits after a global anti-profit-shifting top-up. Contracting & franchising: Lead firms are jointly responsible for compliance in core operations like warehousing, logistics, retail support to block offshoring of payroll responsibility. CEO-pay link: Firms with a CEO: median pay ratio > 20:1 lose access to accelerated depreciation and certain credits until compliant.
5) Inflation & Small business protections.
Competition enforcement: fund DOJ/FTC to police margin-hiking in concentrated sectors like food, shipping, health-care supply, etc. Procurement standards: federal and state buyers require compliance with the wage schedule and neutrality in organizing; this rewards high-road employers. Startup safe harbor: new firms or those with <3 years old and <20 employees get automatic micro-business credits with simplified filing. Rural support: a supplemental micro-merchant grant for rural Main Street (under $2M receipts) to cover non-wage transition costs.
6) Why Not Keep the Old System?
The old model which provides poverty or near-poverty wages looks cheap on payroll but expensive everywhere else. Customers who can’t afford the very goods and services local businesses sell. Public systems quietly subsidizing low wages while mega-corporations book record buybacks. We’ve been paying the bill, just not at the register.
This wage reform can fundamentally rebuild the working class in America. The revenue package to pay for the subsidy (70% top corporate bracket, modern excess-profits tax, high-end personal brackets, buyback excise) is designed to exceed peak costs, leaving room to fund public-sector wage catch-ups (teachers, nurses, EMTs) and IRS enforcement to keep the playing field honest. We can build public dashboards to show prices by sector, and enforcement actions so the public can see who’s paying fairly. This is a move for the people, not the corporations who think that they are one.