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.
That’s been a poverty wage for at least 15 years.
Yeah, the “$15 minimum wage” conversation has been going on for so long that the actual number adjusted for inflation would be well into the mid $20 range. IIRC, it would currently land somewhere around $24.75 per hour.
And if the idea of a $24.75 minimum wage makes you balk, maybe you should consider how little you’re being paid for the work you do, when compared to what the minimum wage used to cover. It used to cover enough for a single full time worker to afford housing, utilities, food, and a car. If you’re struggling to do that and you’re making in the mid $20’s, then congrats you know how it felt to be paid minimum wage when it was introduced.
A living wage in #Arkansas, one of the cheapest/poorest states is between $22 and $23 per hour.
Democrats won’t, but they could campaign on 30$/hr (25$/hr tipped), and then be “reasonable” and “negotiate” down to passing a living federal wage based on the cheapest/poorest state, adjusted each year on labor day to ensure it is a living wage. (It would still exceed 15$/hr.)
For an individual supporting themselves. For anyone with a family, it’s been a poverty wage for a very long time. Spoiler, more than a third of minimum wage earners have children to support.
Um? I’m making more than twice that and I can just barely afford rent, food, etc. I’d hesitate to call anything below $15/hr even remotely livable, and that’s out in the sticks.
Poverty wage is not anywhere near a liveable wage. It’s the federal definition for “too poor to survive without assistance.” A living wage is enough to support yourself, a family, and leaves enough to find personal fulfillment. That’s at least two to three times the poverty wage, depending on where you live and how many dependents you have.
FDR intended for the minimum wage to be a living wage, not a poverty wage. The oligarchs that run America prefer a minimum wage be below a poverty wage, because poor people are easier to exploit.
it gets darker and more insidious than that. america’s definition of poverty is unique unto ourselves. the rest of the world views poverty as a condition in which a person is unable to do all the human things humans do. poverty wages, everywhere else, is anyone not making a living wage. but we, in our incredible exceptionalism, defined our own definition of poverty, and then refuse to acknowledge that more and more people are slipping into it.
the key to understanding why we refuse to acknowledge this is because poverty is enforced. it is always enforced. the natural order of nature is for humans to care for eachother. the greedy parasites who control us though need us to be desperate enough to keep us from realizing we provide them with comforts we do not benefit from because we’re just trying to scrape out a basic living from table scraps.
The solution is obviously to abolish HHS.
The criteria must be wrong because by these metrics half of Americans are below poverty!
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
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
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
