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.
“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?