Tax Season just passed. For a lot of families, it meant a late Christmas.

Let me explain.

I have a new piece up at Common Dreams today on “No Tax on Tips” and what it delivered for working people. Before I get to that, I want to tell you about my mom.

One of the things we fail to recognize is that different classes have different cultures. And one of the defining cultural experiences of being poor in America is waiting for tax refund checks. So you can finally breathe. Maybe even get some things you wished for all year.

Growing up, I did not even know other people paid money during tax season. That is because of a policy called the Earned Income Tax Credit. The government’s way of saying: we know your job does not pay you enough, so here is some of it back.

My mom would check the mail every day in February. And when that check came, she’d buy us new shoes. Fill the fridge. Sit down at the table like the weight had come off her shoulders. Just for a week.

I called it February Christmas. My mom turned one week into a holiday. She made it feel like everything was going to be okay.

That is who she is. That is who millions of people are.

They deserve more than one week.

I thought about her this week, watching “No Tax on Tips” collide with reality. A policy sold as help for working people. A policy that, for most tipped workers, delivered nothing.

Two-thirds of tipped workers earn too little to owe federal income tax in the first place. A tax cut on income you do not owe is not a tax cut. It is a headline.

“No Tax on Tips” was not help. It was a performance of help. Trump knew. The Congressmembers who passed the law knew. Workers were the last to find out.

The policy tipped workers actually need is a raise — a real living wage, written into law. Corporate lobbying has spent generations and millions of dollars fighting to block it. The federal subminimum wage for tipped workers has been $2.13 an hour since 1991.

The cost of living crisis is a wage crisis. People do not earn what they deserve. That is why I do what I do — as Director of Narrative Strategy at One Fair Wage, supporting the Living Wage For All Coalition (building campaigns to win the highest minimum wage in US history). More on that work soon.

Read the full piece at Common Dreams → https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/no-tax-on-tips-not-for-workers

They are telling us AI will destroy humanity.

Elon Musk calls it “the greatest threat to the continued existence” of our species. Sam Altman warns of “civilizational destruction.” Geoffrey Hinton — one of the people who built the thing — says it poses an existential risk. And maybe it does.

But listen to who is saying it. The people warning us are the same people building it. And it is supposed to make them very, very rich.

In 2025, companies admitted to nearly 55,000 layoffs to AI. In the first three months of 2026 alone, they admitted almost 28,000 more — with March the first month on record where AI was the leading reason for job cuts in this country. The fear is not hypothetical. It is already arriving in email form.

They are not helping us. They are setting our expectations.

If you are bracing for the end of the world, you are not asking what you want the world to look like. A world where AI takes your job and hands you a retraining voucher feels like mercy — if you were promised annihilation. A world where the same people who built the machines keep all the gains feels like the natural order — if the alternative was extinction.

Low expectations are not a warning. They are a floor. And the people setting the floor are the people who benefit from wherever we land. The productivity flows up. The losses flow down. The gap is the business model.

So let’s ask the question they are counting on us not to ask.

What if AI is not an existential risk but an existential reward?

This is not only about AI. The move is older than that. What they don’t want us to do — ever, on anything — is imagine a world better than the one we are in now. Narrow what we are allowed to imagine, and the future belongs to the people who already have power. It works on AI. It works on wages. It works on what this country is for.

So imagine anyway. That is where it starts.

Fear of automation, at its root, is that we cannot imagine valuing people outside of their labor. We have spent a hundred years telling each other that your worth is what you produce. Now a machine produces it faster, and we panic. Not because the machine is evil. Because we built a world where a person without a job is a person without a place.

That is not a fact about technology. That is a failure of our imagination.

So imagine it: Machines doing the work they can do. Us doing the work only we can do. Caring for our parents as they age. Raising our kids. Teaching. Building something with our hands. Cooking for the people we love. Sitting with a neighbor.

Beautiful work. Work that has always been the most important work there is. Work we have never paid for because we decided, a hundred years ago, that only the work a machine could measure counted.

A machine can measure almost anything now. The hours are ours to take back.

The rules of American work are a hundred years old. The minimum wage. The 40-hour week. The weekend. Someone decided those were the rules. Someone can decide new ones. A shorter work week. A living wage for the work a human has to do. Time to rest. Time to live. Time to be a parent, a neighbor, a friend — not because you squeezed it into a Sunday, but because the economy finally admitted that is what you are here for.

My mother has spent her whole life waiting for a Sunday afternoon that didn’t end. A few hours in a classroom helping kids learn to read. A walk. A dinner with the people she loves. She has done every one of those things. She has just never been allowed to do them on a Tuesday.

The only thing between us and that world is a story that says we do not deserve it.

If AI takes your job, what would you want to do instead?

For me, I would run a food truck. Or coach high school football. Or dedicate my life to studying plants and fungi.

Your answer is not a fantasy. It is a demand. And you are not the first to make it. Rideshare drivers are already organizing against the autonomous vehicles coming for their work. The contractors who trained ChatGPT have unionized. All over the country, the people whose labor is being converted into another person’s profit are saying the same thing. Not like this.

So keep dreaming. Your dream is your leverage.

The people who told us to be afraid were counting on us to forget we could want more.

We want more.

I will be writing more about AI. I am releasing two pieces of work soon.

The first is a paper I’ve been writing with the Economic Security Project on recovering wages and wealth — an argument that decades of suppressed pay are a debt owed to working people, and a proposal for how to begin paying it back.

The second is Workers First AI, a project I co-lead with Andy Stern on how new technology and even automation can benefit workers. We’re working with rideshare drivers to put force behind those ideas.

Subscribe if you want to see them when they land.

Metal. Wood. Water.

Into Bombs. Missiles. Drones.

Every weapon could have been a home. Every tank could have fed a family. Every war could have sustained our Earth.

Instead, we continue to turn life into death.

I hoped we would gain the wisdom against war.

We still have work to do.

A low-wage worker’s life is hard. It is hoping the impossible math of your bills suddenly becomes possible. It is hoping a new job, new raise, or new life may emerge. It is hoping for a gift from the heavens, a winning lawsuit, or a lottery ticket that brings you to the top.

It is a lot of hoping, and a lot of being let down.

Our broken economy is bad for the millions of workers who do not get what they deserve.

But it is bad for the rest of us too.

You walk into a restaurant and you see the server and you know. You book a car and you know. You order delivery and you know. You hire a person to clean your home and you know.

You know their life is hard. You know it doesn’t work for them. You know they are not getting what they need and what they deserve.

You know because you were once that person — or because you never were and you know how rare that is.

In a country with a broken economy, every ordinary transaction becomes weighty. It carries the guilt of knowing that the person in front of you is struggling and you can only do so much about it.

The guilt is not the problem. The guilt is a correct reading of a broken system.

Early on, we quell that guilt through action. We use it to tip better, to donate to worker organizations, and to help change our systems.

What frightens me, though, is that as systems do not change, we begin to quell that guilt through another choice: numbness.

The guilt gets heavy, so we shut it off. We stop paying attention. We stop looking into the eyes of the person serving us, we stop hearing the uncertainty in their voice, we stop using the power we have to make things right.

If we are not careful, our broken and still breaking economy results in fewer people caring. So the system breaks further, so fewer people care, and it breaks more.

What is at stake is our compassion for working people. The things that are hard want to make us callous — callous to things we do not want to be callous to.

We have seen it happen. We call workers heroes in times of extraordinary need. We mean it. And then we forget.

That is the clock we have to beat.

We Must Bring a Deservingness Story to a Deservingness Fight

I’ve lived both sides of America’s deservingness story.

Growing up, my family needed help. My mom spent her life serving others in customer service, restaurants, and schools. She was treated like a potential criminal every time we turned to the government. I remember her fear that we might not eat because she’d missed a checkbox on a form. When we asked for help, we weren’t met with respect. We were met with suspicion.

Years later, I walked into Yale on a full ride, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Suddenly, I wasn’t just treated as intelligent — I was treated as good. Worthy of trust, admiration, investment.

It was praise for me. Celebration at me. Just a handful of years after blame at us, shame towards us.

The change wasn’t in me. It was in the story the world told about me.

That story — who deserves what, and why — is the most powerful force in American politics. More powerful than any policy paper. More powerful than any campaign platform. More powerful than any corporate lobby. It decides who gets a hand and who gets left behind, whose suffering is a crisis and whose is a character flaw.

And for decades now, the people who should be fighting hardest over that story have been refusing to show up.

The people who benefit from the rest of us not getting what we deserve — they figured this out a long time ago. They understood that Americans don't judge things on their merits. We evaluate the moral standing of the world around us through our understanding about who deserves what. So they told a story about who deserves what and why.

We know the story. Welfare queens. Takers versus makers. Handouts for people who won't help themselves. Unskilled workers. Lazy, cheating, liars who depend on the government for what they should do for themselves. All accusations hurled at my mom.

Their story is not true. But it is effective.

Because it spoke the language. Americans’ moral compass is guided by perceptions of effort, responsibility, and contribution. They told a story of how effort, responsibility, and contribution justify their privileges and others’ pain.

Meanwhile, we have not mounted a proper defense. We, the people not getting what we've earned, have watched deservingness do its damage. We've watched it gut the programs our taxes fund and we're entitled to. We've watched it turn poverty or instability into a moral verdict. We've watched it justify decades of theft, whether as wage suppression, rigged financial systems, or taxes that ask more from a school teacher than a billionaire financier.

People on our side decided the whole concept was toxic. Deservingness and the claims that bolster it became words to avoid: we chose to not speak in terms of effort, responsibility, contribution — merit, productivity, skill. Meritocracy became a myth to debunk.

The people who were supposed to be fighting with us retreated to the language of systems, structures, and rights. They talked about inequality as a technical problem — academic measurements, policy mechanisms, and program design.

They thought they were being more sophisticated.

But they were surrendering.

Because you don’t get to opt out of deservingness. Americans decide who gets what based on who they believe deserves it. That’s not going to change because a think tank published a report about structural barriers. It’s not going to change because an economist explained that poverty is systemic. The question “who deserves what?” is always operating. If you refuse to answer it, they will answer it for you.

And they have. For decades.

Deservingness is the battleground. It is how justice and equality are won or lost in the United States. It is how we fight for the fair distribution of resources. We judge every policy — if not every single thing that happens to every single person — by whether we believe people got what they deserve.

If you try to kill it — if you tell people that the whole system is a lie, that what you do does not matter — you will lose them. Not because they’re naive. Because we want to believe our actions matter. We want to believe our work will be rewarded and help earn us the life we want to live.

Consider what this means for the people doing the work

You work hard. They call it unskilled. You show up every day. They call it not enough. You hold everything together. They call it replaceable.

Effort, responsibility, contribution. These words govern our world. But whose effort counts? Whose responsibility is honored? Whose contribution gets called essential — and whose gets called unskilled?

These terms are not objective truths.

They are weapons in a fight.

And right now, only one side is using the arms at their disposal.

We cannot keep failing to bring a deservingness story to a deservingness fight.

So, what is our deservingness story?

The plain truth.

We do not have to search far. We do not need to craft a narrative. We do not need to devise the right message.

The truth is all we need.

People built our country. People sustain it every day. People grow and serve the food we eat, teach the generations that are our future, and transport the products we rely on. People care for us when we are in need. People work until their body aches, until their mind hurts, and until they have no choice but to have less to give. The wealth that makes America the wealthiest country in the world — people made it. The beauty and connection that makes our wealth worth anything — people create it.

People earned what they have and deserve more than they get.

Merit is not a myth. It’s been misassigned.

We built a system that depends on people it refuses to respect. So when a person's body breaks down from decades of manual labor, when a new innovation strikes and a person's skills become outdated, when a corporation finds a path to greater profit elsewhere — we discard the people we once depended on.

The moment a person is no longer as profitable as they once were, our system throws them away.

The harm our systems inflict on people is a result of our failure to tell the truth about what they deserve.

We've spent decades rewarding asset ownership over people’s work, distant abstractions over direct service, consultation over contribution. We tell people to work hard — and then deny fair reward to the people whose work holds things together. These facts are destroying us.

The scale is shocking. Since 1975, $80 trillion has been diverted from 90% of American workers to the top 10%. Over a career, that compounds to nearly $1 million per worker. A Millennial has already lost over $500,000. A Gen Z worker entering the labor force today is already falling behind at the same rate.

These are not abstractions. These are empty savings accounts, unpurchased homes, unborn children.

This is theft.

Millions of people, every day, do not get what they are owed because we have failed to bring a deservingness story to a deservingness fight.

I know because I watched it in my own family.

My mom's partner Joe — the closest thing I have to a father — spent years in manufacturing and warehouse jobs until those jobs vanished. Outsourcing. So he shifted to call centers. He became a manager. He adapted and kept working. Then, those jobs disappeared too. Automation.

My mom spent her life in customer service, restaurants, and schools. Alongside, she did the work that never showed up in any paycheck at all: raising children, holding a family together, making a home out of not enough. None of it was paid what it was worth.

They don’t want anyone to tell them they’re worthy. They don’t want to hear that they’re disadvantaged and need charity. They don’t want to be studied, surveyed, or saved.

They want their country to give back what they deserve.

I grew up in poverty and homelessness in Arizona. I went on to Yale on a full scholarship, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where I earned a PhD in Public Policy & Economics.

Now I’m based in New York City. If you’ve read my About page, you know the longer version — from my father’s departure after 9/11, to being homeless with my mom and sisters, to the journey that brought me here. That page tells you why I write.

This page tells you what I’m working on.

The Work I Do In the World

I am fighting to create an America that honors and respects the people who hold it all up.

Right now, I’m the Director of Narrative Strategy at One Fair Wage, where I am helping build Living Wage For All. We are a coalition of labor unions, community organizations, and civil rights groups working to raise the minimum wage to a true living wage — starting with at least $25 to $30 an hour. We are in 8 states, with 9 campaigns, and can win a raise for 17 million workers. The argument is simple. One job should be enough. If you spend your life sustaining this country, it owes you more than survival.

I'm a Fellow at the Economic Security Project, where I've been working on an idea: significant cash payments from the government — funded by reclaiming wealth from the richest corporations — are how we can repair America. And it won’t be charity. It is money people earned through their work and never received. Calling it what it is changes everything about who owes whom what.

I’m a contributing author to a forthcoming book, alongside Saru Jayaraman, What Has Democracy Done For Me Lately? (The New Press, 2026). The central thesis: if work doesn’t pay, democracy doesn’t work. We’re drawing on worker interviews, worker-led organizing, and the history of how our economy was designed. We’re writing from inside the crisis and the work to fix it.

I'm co-leading a project with Andy Stern (President Emeritus of SEIU, the major labor union). We're designing worker protections against AI and automation. We're starting with the autonomous vehicle transition — and drivers are at the center of the project: their concerns, their expertise, their preferred solutions. Not after they've been displaced, but now, while the rules are still being written. If we get it right for rideshare drivers, we'll have a replicable model for every industry AI transforms next.

My PhD examined the American Dream and the idea of meritocracy — the story we tell about who deserves what and why. The story that the poor are poor because of their flaws, and the rich are rich because of their virtues. Yet, the values at the heart of America — fairness, opportunity, reward for contribution — are not the problem. Rather, if we followed them, as almost all Americans want, they would lead us to a transformed world: a world where our work connects us, freedom is true, and America’s promises are kept.

All of my work is about the truth: People deserve better, because people hold it all up.

Where to Start Reading

Here are recommendations for pieces to begin with, depending on what brought you here.

If you want the argument at the center of my work: Who Deserves More. If you only read one thing, read this.

If you’ve felt guilty for doing okay in an economy that isn’t: The Guilt of Walking Around in a Broken Economy — on the feeling the system wants us to carry, and why we shouldn’t.

If you came here from the AI conversation: They Are Setting Our Expectations — on who gets to tell us what the future looks like, and why it keeps shrinking.

If you want to see the pattern in one policy: No Tax on Tips Was Never for Workers — on a policy sold as help, built to do nothing.

If you’d rather watch than read: War Turns Life Into Death — two minutes, one argument.

For everything else, the writing lives under the Writing tag and the videos under Videos.

I will share the questions, reflections, and insights that emerge from my work. I am sharing because the future we deserve needs all of us to build.

This is an act of love and trust. Hard times require our best selves, and I will do my best to give mine — openly and freely.

Thank you for being here.

Rayan

Share American Dreams & Nightmares

To those who hold up the world, even knowing it may abandon them in return.

I have lived the American Dream and the American Nightmare.

My father fled discrimination following 9/11. My family then spent years in poverty and, often, homeless. We moved between around 30 homes across the Phoenix Valley—random Craigslist roommates, parking lots, motels.

We struggled because work never paid what we deserved. My mom worked essential jobs and raised three children by herself, yet we did not even have basic stability.

My family’s struggles echoed the stories all around us.

My neighbors — recent immigrants, often without documents — worked hard, giving everything to a country that might turn on them at any moment.

My friends wanted to build a future and find work that mattered — and found that their country guarantees nothing of what it asks them to pledge allegiance to each day.

Our stories were the same in spirit, if not always in detail.

My mom and stepfather spent decades working and sacrificing to build our great economy. Then it abandoned them the moment they were no longer profitable.

My sisters teach children and create art — essential work that makes society possible and beautiful. Yet they receive little in return.

We want the best for each other, and we are willing to work to make it happen. I believe that.

Then, because of the people around me, I became the young man with a full scholarship to one of the nation’s most historic schools.

I went to Yale. I was out of place from the start — a kid from dirt road Arizona, thousands of miles from home, and first generation in my family to go to college. Classmates bragged about decor in their homes worth more than my family’s annual income.

But, I worked hard. And soon, people noticed. I was given opportunity after opportunity, including to learn from the leaders of our nation. Secretary of State John Kerry selected me to advise him on economic inequality.

I remember my first time entering our nation’s Capitol, realizing how far I had come from rusty trailers and motel rooms, from my biggest dream being my family getting into a homeless shelter.

There I was. From homelessness to testifying in Washington DC.

Then, when greater heights and starker contrast could not feel possible, the opportunity of a lifetime came.

I became one of thirty-two Americans to earn a Rhodes Scholarship. A full ride to Oxford. 1,000-year old Oxford!

It happened fast. Suddenly, I was appearing in press coverage by reporters I never spoke to. My hometown news station showed up at our apartment — tiny, aging, though cozy — and hundreds of congratulations messages came in. People I loved and people I never met were pointing to me as an example of the American Dream. In Facebook comments, Instagram posts, Reddit forums, the message was: He made it.

I was so grateful. I am so grateful.

But, I didn’t feel right.

It was praise for me. Celebration at me. Just a handful of years after blame at us, shame towards us. I held both feelings at once and didn’t know what to do with them.

Just as I felt when I was younger that the story being told about my family and community was not true—we were not poor because we were wrong, flawed, or bad—I knew the story being told about me now was not true. At least not fully.

I worked hard, yes. I fought. I did my best.

But so did so many others.

I arrived in Oxford and was asked what I wanted to study. Given a full scholarship and free reign of the university, what would it be?

I chose to study what I had lived: the two sides of America.
The side that is poor because we failed.
And the side that made it because we earned it.

I spent years researching where these stories came from — why we center individual responsibility as if it were the whole truth, and what we leave out when we do.

What we leave out is structure. The design behind our economy and government determines what effort can become. It means the same hard work produces radically different outcomes depending on what work you do, where you are born, and to whom.

Individual responsibility isn’t a guide to interpret the world — it’s a standard we’ve never actually met.

And that gap — between what we promise and what we deliver — is at the heart of everything.

America’s aspirations are clear: guarantee every person the opportunity to live the life they want, and especially honor those who live it in service of others.

These are beautiful values. They are what all of us want our country to be.

But too often we mistake the aspiration for the achievement. We skip from “we should become” to “we are.”

“We are the land of opportunity.”

“If you work hard, you will succeed.”

In reality, these are goals — not descriptions. And when we treat a goal as an accomplished fact, we don’t just get the history wrong. We change what the present means.

If America is already a land of opportunity and if hard work already guarantees success, then where people end up becomes evidence. Our outcomes become verdicts: If you succeeded, you earned it. If you are struggling, you deserve it.

And the story we tell grows. It becomes how we see each other, so it becomes how we treat each other, so it becomes policy. We tell ourselves poor people are irresponsible, so we build systems that leave them unsupported. We tell ourselves the wealthy are uniquely virtuous, so we build systems that multiply their advantages.

Blame and praise circle endlessly. The inequalities beneath them remain unchanged.

I left America so I could look back at it. At the place that made me.

My years studying in Oxford affirmed what I learned growing up. It took earning a PhD to know what I always felt.

In America, deservingness is the battleground.

We judge every government policy — if not every single thing that happens to every single person — by whether we believe people got what they deserve. It is a fight being waged all the time around us.

And we know who is winning.

We have to bring a deservingness story to a deservingness fight.

Luckily, the story we have is a great one. Because it is not just a story, it is the truth:

People, through their sacrifices and their work, have built this country. They make all we are and all we plan to become possible. So they deserve the benefits.

Our country is what people put into it. It is the care we give, the time we sacrifice, the life poured into building and teaching and transporting and cleaning. The economy does not happen to us. It is us. We are the economy.

And we are America.

And yet, every day, the people we most depend on are treated as disposable.

Our system abandons people the moment they are no longer profitable. Even if they have given their life to sustaining it. Even if they built it.

As a result, work feels less like part of a good life and more like a life sentence.

This is our reality.

It is my mom’s story. It is the story of millions. It is the truth about America.

Until we close the gap between what we promise and reality, everything about America is in question.

If a lifetime of meaningful contribution cannot guarantee a good life, then we have nothing.

We don’t have meaningful civil rights. We don’t share equal opportunity.

Freedom is lost. Democracy is done. America is a lie.

But, it doesn’t have to be.

People, every day in every part of our country, work to help it fulfill its possibility and promises. We share meals when one of us is hungry. We mourn losses that didn’t happen to us. We celebrate wins that don’t benefit us. And we show up for each other in ways no policy requires and no paycheck rewards — because we understand, without being told, that we are in this together.

This is also America. It has always been.

What is missing is not the will of people.

What is missing is a system that honors it.

From a childhood of nightmares, I have lived my dreams. I have enough to protect my family. So I am dedicating the rest of my life to a bigger project: building the country that we know is possible.

American Dreams & Nightmares is where I share that work — the insights, questions, and hard-won reflections that come from being inside it. From active campaigns with worker organizations. From research on work, technology, and the future of the economy. From asking, every day, how we make this country what it needs to be.

I commit to building together. I commit to this fight. Forever.

I’m glad you’re here. I hope you’ll stand alongside me.

With love,

Rayan

To learn more about what I’m working on, read Start Here.

I am here to build community and to help improve our world. I would be grateful to have you alongside me.

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