Word association game. I’ll go. I say, “9 months.” You say…?

Pregnancy.

School year.

Average period of unemployment.

This week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) joined the chorus of voices supporting a U.S. minimum wage increase. The IMF noted that raising the wage should be a part of a policy agenda to “fortify the country’s economic future.”

An excellent new study by In the Public Interest, Race to the Bottom: How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class, makes the important connections between outsourcing public services and public-sector jobs, the shrinking of the American middle class, and the increase in economic inequality in the United States.

Starting tomorrow and continuing through the end of July, political, faith, labor and nonprofit leaders will gather outside the Capitol each Wednesday to read and listen to the stories that more than 2,000 Americans have shared.

These stories will make vivid and visible the senseless hardship and unnecessary struggle that hard-working Americans have been exposed to as a result of political obstruction.