The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025
51 comments
·April 30, 2025SimianSci
RiverCrochet
> The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table
Absolutely, but it seems to me that as long as companies have A) the option to not hire people and/or B) ways to side-step minimum wage with non-US labor, minimum wage won't achieve that goal for everyone. It will enable the goal for a few and the rest will have a 0 hour work week and a harder time getting any type of job.
But there's the other side of the question - why is a roof over your head and food on your table getting so expensive? That's what needs to be addressed. High rent/housing/food costs prevent cheap labor. There's no point in raising minimum wage to $20/hr if the price of food and rent keeps going up.
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blululu
Inflation sucks but it is a basic reality. As a request to policy folks out there please consider advocating the minimum wage have some connection to local CPI. A demand for a $xx/hr minimum globally is going to be both too high and too low and irrelevant in a few years time either way. This should not be an issue that needs to be relitigated every 5-10 years just to get back to where we started. The minimum should be set to reflect a basic standard of living in a given locale and not an arbitrary number.
idle_zealot
This is obviously good policy, but is effectively impossible because a large contingent of policymakers don't want there to be a minimum wage. In a past era they could trade votes for an $X/hr minimum in exchange for something they wanted, confident that any law they helped pass would be effectively obsolete in a few years anyway, while what they bargained for would live on. A proposal for a scaling minimum wage would never pass. This isn't just a dig at Republicans, by the way, there are plenty of fiscal conservatives among the Dems too.
davisr
Shameful, especially here in Wisconsin where the minimum wage is still set to $7.25/hour. And even more shameful the tactics used by gig-companies like Uber and DoorDash to depress their own liabilities, and worker wages, even further down.
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
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bpodgursky
Officially, 1% of Americans currently earn minimum wage. Essentially 100% of those people are making more via tips or under the table. The clearing wage for unskilled labor is at least $12/hr everywhere in the country, more like $15 or $20 in cities.
Fine to argue for a higher wage or EITC or whatever but it's goofy to pretend that people are trying to survive on the federal minimum wage. Nobody is, anyone offered $7.25/hr for a job would laugh in their face and get a different job.
Renaud
So, you're saying it's a non issue?
If virtually no one earns $7.25/hr and employers wouldn't dream of offering it, then why not just raise the federal minimum to $12?
If it’s truly irrelevant, then it won’t affect anyone -workers won’t be hurt, and businesses won’t be forced to pay more than they already do. Seems like a win-win, right?
nozzlegear
Devil's advocate, but your experiment would be just as effective if they removed the minimum wage too.
bpodgursky
No, because if you pin the minimum wage to wages at full employment, there's no downward flexibility when a recession hits, and you end up with tons of deadweight loss in the labor market.
There's never political will to lower the wage even if economic conditions call for it. There's no benefit to raising the wage now, but there's inevitably a big cost in a few years.
notjulianjaynes
> Essentially 100% of those people are making more via tips or under the table
source please
bpodgursky
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2023/
> Nearly 8 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2023 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving-related jobs. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 4.)
There's a long tail but you can start with 80% of that 1% getting tips in food service.
anonym29
The pace with which the cost of living is rising is staggering. Heck, I remember the fight for 15 (referring to the campaign to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/h) a decade ago, but I don't see how someone could live on that, $2600/mo pre-tax income, in most of the country these days either. That's like 60%+ of your gross income on rent for a typical 1br across large swaths of the country, no?
nozzlegear
> I don't see how someone could live on that, $2600/mo pre-tax income, in most of the country these days either. That's like 60%+ of your gross income on rent for a typical 1br across large swaths of the country, no?
Probably really location dependent, like you said. I could definitely live on that where I live in rural Iowa; the mortgage for my 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house is less than $800 per month.
anonym29
I assume you bought years ago at a low interest rate - please correct me if I'm wrong.
What do you figure the mortgage would be at today's price and interest rates?
nozzlegear
You're right, we were lucky and bought it toward the end of 2016 with a 3.3% interest rate, right before house values and interest rates started shooting up.
I'm not sure what it's worth today, but we bought it for 90k, so call it 150k? According to a mortgage calculator that I found online, my monthly payment would increase from the $800 I pay now (includes escrow and extra toward the principal) to about $1350 per month with escrow. Definitely a big jump, and I'm not so sure it's doable on that $15/hr minimum wage; it would require my wife to work as well if we want any disposable income after the mortgage, bills and groceries.
the__alchemist
The way this usually works out is roommates.
AdmiralAsshat
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chriscrisby
How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage. Not every job is meant to be a “living wage”.
d4mi3n
High school kids don't work full time year-round.
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
marcus_holmes
How are you supposed to live if your job doesn't pay you a living wage?
sarchertech
The OP is specifically talking about high school students who are supported by their parents.
toomuchtodo
What was the last job you had that calibrated your pay by asking if you were a dependent? Should someone make less if they are married? Should adult parents be paid less if they live with and are supported by a child? It is irrelevant.
nullc
By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
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Larrikin
Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.
meltyness
The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."
notjulianjaynes
Most minimum wage workers are not teenagers https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/
toomuchtodo
Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor.
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
platevoltage
here we go. Fine. make a law that adults have to be paid a living wage so that this talking point can disappear for good.
sarchertech
I don’t think it’s that easy. Creating multiple classes of workers with different wage floors creates new problems.
It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
platevoltage
I mean, I know it's not a perfect solution. This was just one of those talking points people use to justify keeping the minimum wage low, or eliminating it all together.
These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
nullc
It's a minimum. Not a good wage. It's the wage level at which if your work is worth less than that you are prohibited from doing it.
Low paid work is a gateway out of poverty, certainly compared to not having work at all.
I don't mean to argue here against a minimum entirely, but we shouldn't lose sight of that fact that it is just that: a minimum. And a minimum impinges both your right to work as well as it does someone's right to employ you.
America is rapidly falling behind its peers. Its been well understood that taking care of your people is the key to prosperity, yet politically we seem to be more worried about ensuring the rich live their lives of leisure at the expense of our working class.
The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table. The fact that the minimum wage is continuously supressed is absurd.