In 2025, the federal minimum wage is officially a “poverty wage.” The annual earnings of a single adult working full-time, year-round at $7.25 an hour now fall below the poverty threshold of $15,650 (established by the Department of Health and Human Services guidelines). The limitations of how the federal government calculates poverty understate how far the minimum wage is from economic security for workers and their families.
Your comments are not federating properly to my instance, but I found the link. Thanks for sharing it, I enjoyed it immensely. =D
07 🟥
You’re welcome. I’ve had issues with comments not federating too. Can you please let your instance admin know, so they can address the issue? Thanks so much.
I posted this on the meta community. The mods and admins will see it.
How should it be possible to leave poverty behind with minimum wage? It’s the minimum. Only people without work can have less.
It’s unfortunate but those who make the least are inevitable the ones who are poor. Not calling it poor is misleading.
“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
THAT was the actual reason the minimum wage was established in the first place. And businesses have been fighting against it ever since - through a combination of lobbying (bribing) politicians and propaganda designed to convince people that those who earn the minimum wage “deserve” to suffer.
Instead of replying to each comment, one big reply here.
Minimum wage works for jobs where people are underpaid because they outcompete each other and drive prices down. It’s essentially a forced union for unskilled workers which is fair because they don’t have the mental capacity to organize themselves.
But listening closely to Roosevelt, ‘any right to continue’ means that those businesses that don’t supress the wages cease to exist. This ends poverty because those people become unemployed and thus don’t count as low income anymore.
As long as there are illegal immigrants who earn less than legal residents, the minimum wage is not really the minimum wage. To be fair, illegal immigrants go to California, New York and Florida while states without own mimimum income laws are mostly southern states.
The real probelm is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
If there were enough jobs, there would be no competition to go below the poverty line.
Additionally, the main problem must be the housing market. Create cheap housing and huge parts of the income don’t go to rent. It’s almost funny that the cheap workers who work in construction cannot build cheap housing for themselves, thanks to zoning laws.
Overall, why should minimum wage work if it would be ridiculous to do that for comfortable wages? If there were a law prohibiting any job that doesn’t pay enough to own a house with pool, we wouldn’t expect that everybody would own such a house. We would expect that the majority of people would be unemployed. Why should that be different for lowpaying jobs?
because they don’t have the mental capacity to organize themselves.
Fuck off
Minimum wage works for jobs where people are underpaid because they outcompete each other and drive prices down. It’s essentially a forced union for unskilled workers which is fair because they don’t have the mental capacity to organize themselves.
Can’t tell if centrist or republican.
Poor is not defined as those who have the least in the economic terms being discussed in this article. That’s why there is a poverty line to define what is meant by poor. The poverty line used by the government needs to be updated however.
If people had more than enough to get by then we wouldn’t considered them poor even if no one had less money than them. Having the least amount of money isn’t the issue. The issue is can a person acquire the goods and services they need to live. If not that’s a problem and we’ve been describing that problem as being poor.
With most states having their own minimum wages higher than the federal one, how relevant is this really?
A lot of those states with higher minimum wage also have a higher cost of living, though, so it’s not all cut and dry.
- A state can just repeal their own minimum wage
- The existence of states using the federal minimum wage means it matters to the people who live in those states
- Poverty anywhere indicates the possibility of poverty everywhere. Being somewhere “without poverty” does not make you safe from poverty. It just means you are less proximate to poverty for now
This is a few years old but gives a lot of reasons, plus clarified it would help a lot if people
Even If you’re trying to be coldly logical, ignoring the health and wellbeing of those millions of people and their children …. Take a look at the section near the end about how much states pay in poverty assistance to people making near minimum wage. This is effectively a subsidy for those businesses paying low wages. Why should state governments be subsidizing those companies? A higher minimum wage means more people can support themselves and the government pays less to support them, less to subsidize those conpanies
I would like to introduce you to the two million people living in Idaho. Federal minimum wage and the state prevents counties or cities from setting a minimum wage different from the state’s.
Yeah it’s bleak there for a lot of reasons. Fun fact Idaho potatoes involve a lot of prison labor
20 states, or 40% of the country, do NOT have higher minimum wages than federal. That seems pretty relevant, especially since a stagnant minimum wage is what’s keeping your own higher than minimum pay suppressed.
You’re right about how many states have minimum wage either explicitly set to 7.25 or lower, or tracking the federal minimum wage (including Georgia, with a state minimum wage of 5.50). I assumed there were fewer of those states, because the number of workers that are being paid the minimum wage (or lower) is 1.1% and dropping.
I guess the question I was trying to allude to is: with fewer and fewer people being paid the minimum wage, and with such enormous disparity between cost of living within a state let alone between states, does it really matter that the federal minimum wage is below the poverty line? There are places in the US where you can live decently on 7.25/hr, and there are places where you would feel squeezed even at 40/hr. National metrics like this one are interesting but not really representative
$15k a year??? That wouldn’t even cover my food let alone a shitty hotel room. Anything below $50k as a single earner is deep in poverty.
IIRC, the federal poverty level doesn’t account for housing, transport, utilities, etc… It basically only accounts for food. And even then, it only accounts for the cheapest of the cheap food; You’d basically be eating white rice and instant ramen every day.
probably economists and politicians, transit is hard to quantify a minimum of because walking is a technical option in many situations.
Yes, it sounds bad. But there is a bright side, too! The week has 168 hours, which means if you work four full time jobs, you can make $60k a year and you still get eight hours of sleep! /s
CEOs read “minimum wage” and they think “maximum wage”.
It’s just a branding issue. /s
