And last year, according to a study by the Institute for Policy Studies, the ratio exploded to 419 to 1. That is unconscionable. No other country in the world has such an enormous gap, or anything even close. These disturbing trends raise grave concerns about the true health of the American economy and its ability to bring low-income working families into the middle class. Our nation has now experienced the longest peacetime expansion in our country's history.
Inflation remains extremely low.
A higher minimum wage can be an engine for at least a modicum of upward mobility. When over the course of two decades the income gap has increased from 42 to 1 to 419 to 1, it is unseemly for most of corporate America to persist in its opposition to a modest increase.