Many of us remember a time when Whole Foods was satirically called “Whole Paycheck,” because that’s what it felt like any time you went grocery shopping there—you spent your whole paycheck. Now, in the midst of an affordability crisis, it’s not such a tongue-in-cheek expression anymore. Amazon (which owns Whole Foods) just announced that, in the wake of a government report that found the number of Amazon workers relying on SNAP and Medicaid tripled between 2020 and 2025, employees will now receive grocery discounts to Whole Foods.
Yes, instead of just paying its employees a living wage, Amazon chose to give its underpaid workers a discount to an overpriced grocery store.
It’s a sad state for workers in America when so many of them earn so little that they have to rely on government assistance programs like Medicaid and SNAP. That includes workers at some of the biggest, most profitable corporations in America, like Walmart, Amazon, Dollar Tree, Starbucks, and more.
What we have right now—major corporations running human exploitation schemes—is not working. We need a better solution than relying on these companies to do the right thing on their own—which is to raise the wages of the employees who bring them their fortunes. Fortunately, we have one in The MONEY Agenda: Prosperity for American Workers Act. It’s a novel idea that is one of the first of its kind to connect the fortunes of American companies to those of American families.
And for this week’s Closer Look, we’ll explain our thinking behind the proposal and why and how it would bring workers the economic relief they need. We know that businesses have an incentive to pay their workers well because it leads to higher returns over the long term. But judging by how many large employers pay too-low wages, it appears they need a federal incentive to give their workers a wage to actually address the cost of living.
Short on time? Check out this slide deck to learn what you need to know about the Prosperity for American Workers Act.
The problem: America’s cost of living crisis
If you’ve walked down a grocery store aisle in recent weeks, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that prices for everything—whether it’s fresh fruits and vegetables, or your favorite snack foods— are rising. No less than two-thirds of the country says that groceries are unaffordable. Nevermind the fact this increase in grocery costs also coincides with an uptick in costs for other essentials like rent, utilities, child care, and more.
High prices wouldn’t be as much of a problem if workers’ wages were rising fast enough to meet the moment, but they unfortunately are not—not by a long shot. According to a report from Dayforce, in 2025, just half of full-time workers in America earned a living wage. And as of this writing, no less than 62 million Americans earn less than $25 an hour.
What makes this wage issue so egregious is that the money to pay these workers is there—it’s just going to wealthy corporate executives. All the money from higher prices and workers’ record-high productivity has gone nowhere but up and into their pockets. In 2025, CEOs at the top 350 firms made an average $27.9 million—325 times as much as their typical workers. At the 20 largest companies with low-wage workers, the average CEO made nearly 900 times more than their median worker. Corporate profits are also eating up their highest share of national income since 1947, while labor’s share is the smallest.
You cannot fill a giant hole with a kid’s toy, just like you cannot fix the affordability crisis without raising wages.
The solution: Prosperity for American Workers Act
Studies have found that businesses that pay their workers well show stronger returns in the long term. This is because, in addition to employees being more motivated, loyal, and productive on the job, they also have more money to spend in their local economies as consumers. One of our Board members, John Driscoll, who co-authored Pay the People! Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America, shared his story of business success as the CEO of CareCentrix after he raised the pay of all of his entry-level employees. John’s success is part of the inspiration behind the third policy proposal in our legislative platform, The MONEY Agenda: the Prosperity for American Workers Act (PAWA).
The idea behind PAWA is simple: if high-revenue companies do not pay their workers enough to cover the basic costs of living, they will have to pay an excise tax.
The beauty and simplicity of this bill is that the policy uses all the tools already in the IRS toolbox to hold companies accountable, including existing cost of living calculations and existing reporting forms. For any company with annual revenues of $10 million or more, they must pay their workers at least a “cost of living” wage, calculated using the IRS Collection Financial Standards, a tool currently used to calculate costs of living at the county level for folks who owe back taxes or file for bankruptcy. The IRS Collection Financial Standards use national averages for clothing, food, and out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, and county level data for housing, utilities, and transportation. This cost of living calculation will set the annualized or hourly wage floor for payroll employees of companies with high revenues, with a slightly higher level for independent contract workers. The reporting would be through existing IRS forms most folks are already familiar with: W3 forms for companies, and W2 and 1099 forms for the workers with one tiny tweak—we add hours worked.
This new tax would be phased in over 10 years, with a 10% tax per year on the wage differential (i.e. the gap between what employers are paying in actuality and what they should be paying to meet the cost of living in their geographic area). This decade-long runway would allow companies time to adjust to a new labor landscape, while asking them to either pay their workers more or contribute to the government’s general fund—a fund that helps pay for the social safety net programs many low-wage workers rely on to make ends meet.
To be clear, PAWA is not a substitute for raising the minimum wage at the federal, state, or local levels, nor is it a substitute for corporate tax reform. We strongly believe that employers should be required by law to pay their employees enough to live on, especially in a country as rich as ours. Many ultra-profitable corporations today aren’t paying anywhere near their fair share in taxes, which does impact worker’s wages. Excise taxes are a tool commonly used already to tax the consumption of certain products, and in some cases used to dissuade extreme consumption of products like tobacco or alcohol. In the case of PAWA, the excise tax should be seen as the consumption of peoples’ labor, and if the workers are not paid enough, there should be a consumption tax levied on their employers.
Conclusion
Here at Patriotic Millionaires, our mission is to create a rich, stable, and free nation with an economic system capable of sustaining it. The MONEY Agenda will get us there, with PAWA playing a unique and pivotal part.
The first two parts of The MONEY Agenda have been introduced in Congress. The Equal Tax Act was introduced in the House and Senate in September 2025 and March 2026, respectively. It asserts a basic level of fairness in our tax code and our economy by treating all income equally for tax purposes. Meanwhile, the Working Americans’ Tax Cut Act was introduced in the House and Senate in March 2026. It works to stabilize the economic lives of working-class Americans by shifting tax revenue responsibility to the millionaire class.
We are hard at work trying to get PAWA, the third platform of our MONEY Agenda, formally introduced in Congress. By introducing an excise tax on companies that pay their workers less than the cost of living in their region, it will meaningfully connect the prosperity of American businesses to the prosperity of American families.
We are not trying to use this policy to run big-box companies like Amazon, Walmart, or Dollar Tree out of business. They employ millions of Americans, and in no way do we want to see any of them lose their jobs. Instead, we’re merely trying to incentivize companies to compensate their workers properly for the work they do.
If all businesses paid all their workers enough to afford their basic needs, this would be a win for everyone. It would be a win for workers, for businesses’ bottom lines, and ultimately for the economy as a whole.
