Washington Center forEquitable Growth The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Improving U.S. Educational Outcomes Robert Lynch: February 2, 2015 This study addresses a key challenge confronting the United States—how to promote both widely shared and faster economic growth. It does so by analyzing and describing the effects of raising educational achievement, especially for those not at the top of the economic ladder. The results of this analysis, which are consistent with a large body of research across a variety of academic disciplines, demonstrate that improving the education of future workers accelerates economic growth and can promote more equal opportunity over the long run. The result: stronger, more broadly shared economic growth, which in turn raises national income and increases government revenue, providing the means by which to invest in improving our economic future. Since the early mos, economic growth in the United States has been relatively slow and income inequality has risen rapidly. Over this same period, income growth has been so sluggish and unevenly distributed that families on the bottom and middle rungs of the income ladder experienced stagnating or declining incomes even as earnings among those at the top increased sharply. In contrast, the years immediately following World War II and continuing into the early 1970s were characterized by relatively rapid and broadly shared growth. Those at the top earned substantially more than those across the middle and bottom of the income spectrum, but high, middle, and low-income earners all saw their incomes grow at about the same rate. A restoration, then, of the economic growth pattern that characterized the first three post-war decades would result in both greater and more widely shared economic growth—equitable growth. In order to address this key challenge confronting the United States, this study empirically quantifies the economic and tax benefits of raising the educationa