Replace the current minimum wage with a minimum percentage. Every company is required to pay its lowest compensated worker no less than a defined minimum percentage of what its highest compensated employee earns. All incomes calculated on a standard 52-week 40-hour basis. Overtime excluded from the calculation.

The rate is set legislatively and starts at current disparity levels — so there is no immediate impact on any company. But corporate America knows it is coming. The phase-in period gives every company time to plan. After phase-in, legislators can use the rate as a direct economic lever.

• Economy stalling — increase the minimum percentage, push money downward into circulation
• Revenue exceeding spending — relax the rate, release pressure
• The tool is transparent, direct, and does not require tax changes or Fed intervention
• The minimum percentage applies to all wages — direct employees, contractors, and subcontractors
• The 1099 environment is abolished or limited to those earning over $60,000 — closing the escape hatch corporations would sprint through otherwise

“The CEO’s raise becomes the worker’s raise. One number. No bureaucracy.”

If a company chooses not to raise floor wages — or chooses to lower CEO pay rather than raise worker pay — it will have a surplus of cash. Every available use of that surplus benefits the broader economy:

• Pay it out as dividends — taxed, money enters circulation
• Distribute it to employees as compensation — taxed, money enters circulation
• Let it sit in a bank — available for loans at lower rates, spurring small business
• Donate it to charity — money enters circulation
• Lower the cost of their products — more money in consumers’ pockets
• Invest in infrastructure, equipment, or innovation

Every option puts money back into circulation. That is the point. The current system allows corporations to accumulate surplus without it flowing back through the economy that generated it. The minimum percentage changes the pressure point without dictating the outcome.

Meanwhile the competitive pressure for labor doesn’t disappear. Nobody is going to work for a wage they cannot live on when the company next door is paying more. The market still sets the actual wage above the minimum — the minimum percentage just ensures the floor is connected to the ceiling.

This platform does not propose eliminating billionaires. It proposes understanding what they actually do in the economy — and designing policy around that reality rather than against it.

Inflation occurs when demand exceeds supply. Demand requires two conditions simultaneously — a consumer who is willing to buy AND able to pay. Raise interest rates and you reduce the ability of poor and middle class consumers who rely on borrowed money to participate. Billionaire wealth parked in banks does the opposite — it removes money from active circulation, reducing inflationary pressure.

• Mark Zuckerberg is not sitting on tens of billions in a mattress
• That wealth sits in banks where it funds car loans, mortgages, student loans, and credit cards at prime interest rates
• When the Fed raises rates to fight inflation it is using the billionaire’s parked wealth as the mechanism
• Opposing billionaires while supporting Fed independence is a logical contradiction
• The question is not whether large capital reserves should exist — it is whether the people holding them earned them through genuine value creation or through extraction

The minimum percentage policy addresses the extraction problem. If a company cannot pay its CEO $27 million without paying its floor workers 0.001% of that, the policy adjusts the environment. It does not confiscate. It does not cap. It connects.

“Billionaires are a necessary economic valve. The question is whether they earned what they hold.”

Higher taxes are justified — but only for one explicit purpose: paying off the national debt. Not recirculating money through government bureaucracy. Not funding new programs that maintain inflationary pressure. Reducing the money supply by retiring debt.

Money collected beyond operational government needs should be retired from circulation entirely. This reduces the money supply, which reduces inflationary pressure, which is the same goal the Fed pursues by raising interest rates — but achieved through fiscal policy rather than monetary policy that happens to enrich the already wealthy.

• Tax increases justified explicitly and only for debt reduction
• Surplus beyond operational needs retired from circulation — not spent into new programs
• The national debt is an inflationary time bomb — every dollar of interest paid is a dollar of new money entering circulation
• Paying it down is both fiscally responsible and anti-inflationary simultaneously

The joke version of this argument: tax billionaires and burn the money in the street in front of Pennsylvania Avenue on July 4th. The serious version is the same argument — money removed from circulation reduces inflationary pressure. Whether it is burned or used to retire debt, the economic effect is identical. Debt retirement is more dignified and has the added benefit of reducing future interest obligations.

“Higher taxes — yes. But only to pay down the debt, not to recirculate money through a bureaucracy that adds no value.”

The full version of the minimum percentage policy applies the rate to all wages paid — not just domestic employees but contractors and subcontractors, including overseas suppliers. This is the most operationally complex element and the one most likely to require phased implementation and robust auditing.

The argument for including overseas suppliers is straightforward — a company that pays its CEO $27 million while its supply chain relies on workers earning pennies per hour is using global labor arbitrage to circumvent the spirit of the policy. The argument against is equally straightforward — this effectively becomes trade policy, not just wage policy, and carries significant geopolitical and diplomatic complexity.

• The domestic application is clean and immediately implementable
• The international application requires a separate legislative and diplomatic track
• Auditing requirements would need a significant expansion of qualified accountants with international expertise — not a bad economic side effect
• The phase-in approach gives companies time to restructure supply chains rather than face immediate disruption

The domestic policy stands on its own even without the international component. Start there. Let the results make the argument for expanding scope.