This site has these sorts of stats for each state.
If you can’t afford basic necessities on minimum wage, the wage is too low and the job doesn’t deserve to exist IMO.
Especially when so many of the largest companies are profitable and making more and more money. This system is unsustainable. It also causes societal unrest which leads to extremism. I don’t understand the mindset behind it, the increasing polarization as things get more and more unaffordable seems to support the theory.
What qualifies as “basic necessities”?
I’m not sure minimum wage has ever been enough for most people to afford an apartment on their own.
Certainly in the early 90s, even in a low cost of living area, I was working 2 jobs (one part time but a bit over minimum wage) in order to share a 500sqft, 1br apartment with a friend.
And part of the problem with trying to set a level of basic necessities (or a ‘living wage’) is that you have to account for a TON of external factors.
For example, nobody is building affordable, reasonably sized apartments or houses any more. They only want to build 2000sqft+ houses, or 1000+sqft apartments with all the trimmings and amenities. That certainly raises the cost of living.
By way of comparison, my grandparents raised 3 kids in a 998sqft 2-story duplex. It’s wasn’t large but it was a good family neighborhood with a park across the street. And they had 1 smallish (for the era) car. So why does everyone need a bajillion square feet and 2 cars, including a massive SUV to raise their 1 or 2 kids these days? (2 cars I get with both parents working these days, but the trucks and SUVs I see many low income families driving is ridiculous).
And is it fair for the minimum wage to have to be set to a rate that subsidizes the builders who choose to only build that bigger, more expensive housing.
We definitely need changes in the way this is all handled, but it’s not a simple thing. To truly solve the issue will require significant changes in our social structure and philosophy.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Throughout industry, the change from starvation wages and starvation employment to living wages and sustained employment can, in large part, be made by an industrial covenant to which all employers shall subscribe. It is greatly to their interest to do this because decent living, widely spread among our 125, 000,000 people, eventually means the opening up to industry of the richest market which the world has known. It is the only way to utilize the so-called excess capacity of our industrial plants. This is the principle that makes this one of the most important laws that ever has come from Congress because, before the passage of this Act, no such industrial covenant was possible.
Franklin Roosevelt, on the creation of a minimum wage.
