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We can fix economic inequality. But we need the political will to do it.

Economic inequality in the United States is real and deeply damaging to the living standards of the vast majority of families. But it’s eminently fixable so long as we’re willing to make a pronounced break with policies of the past to make income growth a genuine political priority.

The roots of inequality’s rise after 1979 are in U.S. labor markets, particularly in the failure of paychecks for most workers to rise in line with broader measures of economic growth.

Take one relevant measure of overall growth — growth in productivity, or the average amount of income generated in an hour of work. Between 1979 and 2018, productivity rose by 70%. But median wages rose by just 14%. Including non-wage benefit growth would nudge up this number, but it would still be far less than half the growth of productivity.

This wedge between economic growth and paychecks is driven by inequality, and the inequality in turn is driven by policy decisions.

The most obvious example: In the first 30 years that the federal minimum wage existed (between 1938 and 1968), Congress frequently increased its value to keep pace with economy-wide productivity. As the overall economy grew, the minimum wage increased.

But the high-water mark for the inflation-adjusted value of the federal minimum wage was reached in 1968, at more than $10 per hour in today’s dollars. If the minimum wage had kept pace with overall productivity growth since then, it would be more than $20 per hour today.

What other policy changes led to the rise in inequality? Capital owners and corporate managers have used policy to unlevel the playing field so that more gains from economic activity flowed to them and away from typical workers.

Policies favor people of means

For example, macroeconomic policy once targeted low rates of unemployment as a primary goal. After 1979, low rates of inflation took precedence, with the result that unemployment rates were kept too high for most workers to credibly threaten to leave their current jobs if they didn’t get faster pay increases.

Labor policy once took as given that workers had the right to organize in unions and bargain collectively. In recent decades, employers have been given free rein to use aggressive tactics to crush these attempts, secure in the knowledge that illegal maneuvers will trigger only small fines.

In the face of this redistribution of power and incomes in the private sector, the countervailing response from taxes and public spending on safety net and social insurance programs has been weak. This federal tax and transfer system does reduce inequality, but only by about the same amount it did when inequality was much lower. And relative to other nations, our public sector does little to sand off the rough edges of inequality.

Critics of an agenda to reduce inequality often claim it will hurt overall economic growth. There is little evidence of this. Growth was faster in U.S. history when institutions ensuring broad prosperity were stronger. And recent decades have brought clear evidence that high inequality is restricting growth by concentrating too much income in the hands of rich households.

Solutions are clear

The steps to reducing inequality are clear: rebuild the institutions and policies that provide workers leverage and bargaining power in labor markets, or build new ones.

Policymakers should re-target genuine full employment (the Fed is making good steps in this direction). The federal minimum wage should be substantially increased. The right to form unions should be vigilantly protected. The unemployment insurance system should be modernized and made substantially more-generous, both as a safety net during bad times but also to make the threat of job loss less corrosive to workers' confidence in wage-bargaining with employers.

Top tax rates should be raised, and taxes on capital incomes should be pushed much closer to taxes on labor income. Key sources of economic security that workers currently have to bargain over with employers — like pensions and health insurance — should be instead provided universally through public programs. Social Security should be made more generous and a robust expansion of public health insurance — Medicaid and Medicare and public options in Obamacare — should be undertaken.

The real obstacle to this agenda is not finding the perfect technocratic policy design, it’s raw political power. The real innovation we need is a genuine social movement dedicated to a more equal economy.

Josh Bivins is director of research at the Economic Policy Institute.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Economic inequality can be fixed, but we need political will to do it.