6 ms·

The federal minimum wage is officially a poverty wage in 2025

86 points by MaysonL 1y ago

AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
[flagged]
- TylerE 1y ago
  It already is.
  - dyauspitr 1y ago
    There’s still more to take for the Trump administration. All that free Medicaid, pesky union pay, silly child labor laws, social security etc. are all luxuries the American public doesn’t deserve.
davisr 1y ago
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
- FeloniousHam 1y ago
  I'm ambivalent about a Federal minimum wage, it's probably mostly harmless, and maybe helps people at the margin. But. No minimum wage allows small businesses to hire the unhireable (eg. teenagers), which gives them a first step on the wage ladder. I looked up Wisconsin wage stats in Gemini[1]. Wage Bracket (Hourly) Estimated Percentage of Jobs Wage Bracket (Annual) Under $12.29 Approximately 13% Under $25,560 $12.29 to $15.27 Approximately 13% $25,560 to $31,771 $15.28 to $18.26 Approximately 16% $31,772 to $37,983 $18.26 to $21.25 Approximately 14% $37,984 to $44,195 $21.25 to $24.23 Approximately 11% $44,196 to $50,407 $24.23 to $27.22 Approximately 10% $50,408 to $56,619 $27.22 to $30.21 Approximately 8% $56,620 to $62,831 $30.21 to $33.19 Approximately 5% $62,832 to $69,044 $33.19 to $36.18 Approximately 5% $69,045 to $75,256 $36.18 to $39.17 Approximately 4% $75,257 to $81,468 $39.17 to $42.15 Approximately 4% $81,469 to $87,680 $42.15 to $45.14 Approximately 4% $87,681 to $93,893 $45.14 and over Data not specifically itemized in this format, but represents the remaining percentage of jobs $93,893 and over Simple competition likely drives wages well above the State mandated minimum wage. [1] "create a distribution table of the population to wages of workers in Wisconsin"
anonym29 1y ago
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?
- the__alchemist 1y ago
  The way this usually works out is roommates.
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
chriscrisby 1y ago
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”.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  How are you supposed to live if your job doesn't pay you a living wage?
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    The OP is specifically talking about high school students who are supported by their parents.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        It's not a question of anyone asking. Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler. It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services. Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
bpodgursky 1y ago
[flagged]
- Renaud 1y ago
  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?
  - bpodgursky 1y ago
    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.
  - nozzlegear 1y ago
    Devil's advocate, but your experiment would be just as effective if they removed the minimum wage too.
- notjulianjaynes 1y ago
  > Essentially 100% of those people are making more via tips or under the table source please
  - bpodgursky 1y ago
    https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2023/ 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.
blululu 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
    It's also a good way to turn the 50 states into a collection of poor vs well-off locations, where being born into one means you are possibly trapped there due to having no money to leave. That plan invites the poorest states to simply fall apart - and like what's already happening: invites the richer states to pick up the burden of paying for states with bad (usually republican) economic policies.
    - idle_zealot 1y ago
      To be fair, most cities are run by Dems. They do not do a good job, and that's only partially because they have to foot the bill of disastrously expensive suburbs.
      - jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nullc 1y ago
[flagged]
SimianSci 1y ago
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.
- RiverCrochet 1y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

86 points by MaysonL 1y ago

AdmiralAsshat 1y ago

[flagged]

TylerE 1y ago
It already is.
- dyauspitr 1y ago
  There’s still more to take for the Trump administration. All that free Medicaid, pesky union pay, silly child labor laws, social security etc. are all luxuries the American public doesn’t deserve.

davisr 1y ago

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

FeloniousHam 1y ago
I'm ambivalent about a Federal minimum wage, it's probably mostly harmless, and maybe helps people at the margin. But. No minimum wage allows small businesses to hire the unhireable (eg. teenagers), which gives them a first step on the wage ladder. I looked up Wisconsin wage stats in Gemini[1]. Wage Bracket (Hourly) Estimated Percentage of Jobs Wage Bracket (Annual) Under $12.29 Approximately 13% Under $25,560 $12.29 to $15.27 Approximately 13% $25,560 to $31,771 $15.28 to $18.26 Approximately 16% $31,772 to $37,983 $18.26 to $21.25 Approximately 14% $37,984 to $44,195 $21.25 to $24.23 Approximately 11% $44,196 to $50,407 $24.23 to $27.22 Approximately 10% $50,408 to $56,619 $27.22 to $30.21 Approximately 8% $56,620 to $62,831 $30.21 to $33.19 Approximately 5% $62,832 to $69,044 $33.19 to $36.18 Approximately 5% $69,045 to $75,256 $36.18 to $39.17 Approximately 4% $75,257 to $81,468 $39.17 to $42.15 Approximately 4% $81,469 to $87,680 $42.15 to $45.14 Approximately 4% $87,681 to $93,893 $45.14 and over Data not specifically itemized in this format, but represents the remaining percentage of jobs $93,893 and over Simple competition likely drives wages well above the State mandated minimum wage. [1] "create a distribution table of the population to wages of workers in Wisconsin"

anonym29 1y ago

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?

the__alchemist 1y ago
The way this usually works out is roommates.
nozzlegear 1y ago
> 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.

chriscrisby 1y ago

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”.

marcus_holmes 1y ago
How are you supposed to live if your job doesn't pay you a living wage?
- sarchertech 1y ago
  The OP is specifically talking about high school students who are supported by their parents.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      It's not a question of anyone asking. Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler. It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services. Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').

bpodgursky 1y ago

[flagged]

Renaud 1y ago
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?
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  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.
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  Devil's advocate, but your experiment would be just as effective if they removed the minimum wage too.
notjulianjaynes 1y ago
> Essentially 100% of those people are making more via tips or under the table source please
- bpodgursky 1y ago
  https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2023/ 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.

blululu 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
  It's also a good way to turn the 50 states into a collection of poor vs well-off locations, where being born into one means you are possibly trapped there due to having no money to leave. That plan invites the poorest states to simply fall apart - and like what's already happening: invites the richer states to pick up the burden of paying for states with bad (usually republican) economic policies.
  - idle_zealot 1y ago
    To be fair, most cities are run by Dems. They do not do a good job, and that's only partially because they have to foot the bill of disastrously expensive suburbs.
    - jsbisviewtiful 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nullc 1y ago

[flagged]

SimianSci 1y ago

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.

RiverCrochet 1y ago
> 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]