7 ms·

Except nobody earns the minimum wage today, it's less than 1/2 of 1% of US labor. The median full-time wage is now $62,000. You can start at $13 at almost any

Except nobody earns the minimum wage today, it's less than 1/2 of 1% of US labor. The median full-time wage is now $62,000. You can start at $13 at almost any national retailer, and $15 or above at CVS / Walgreens / Costco. The cashier positions require zero work background, zero skill, zero education. You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars.

GoatInGrey 10mo ago
Counterpoint: affording average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment (~$1,675) requires that exact median full-time wage. $15 an hour affords you about $740 for monthly housing expenses. One can suggest getting two roommates for a one-bedroom apartment, but they would be missing the fact that this is very unusual for the last century. It's more in line with housing economics from the early-to-mid 19th century.
jfindper 10mo ago
>You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars. Holy moly! 11 whole dollars an hour!? Okay, so we went from $4.25 to $11.00. That's a 159% change. Awesome! Now, lets look at... School, perhaps? So I can maybe skill-up out of Little Caesars and start building a slightly more comfortable life. Median in-state tuition in 1995: $2,681. Median in-state tuation in 2025: $11,610. Wait a second! That's a 333% change. Uh oh. Should we do the same calculation with housing...? Sure, I love making myself more depressed. 1995: $114,600. 2025: $522,200. 356% change. Fuck.
- genewitch 10mo ago
  1980 mustang vs 2025 mustang is what i usually use. in the past 12 years my price per KWh electricity costs have doubled. in the mid 90s you could open a CD (certificate of deposit at a bank or credit union) and get 9% or more APY. savings accounts had ~4% interest. in the mid 90s a gallon of gasoline in Los Angeles county was $0.899 in the summer and less than that any other time. It's closer to $4.50 now.
- mrits 10mo ago
  The BBQ place across the street from me pays $19/hour to be a cashier in Austin. Or the sign says it does anyways
  - jfindper 10mo ago
    sweet! according to austintexas.gov, that's only $2.63 below the 2024 living wage. $5.55 below, if you use the MIT numbers for 2025. As long as you don't run into anything unforseen like medical expenses, car breakdowns, etc., you can almost afford a bare-bones, mediocre life with no retirement savings.
    - hylaride 10mo ago
      I don't disagree that there has been a huge issue with stagnant wages, but not everybody who works minimum wage needs to make a living wage. Some are teenagers, people just looking for part time work, etc. Pushing up minimum wage too high can risk destroying jobs that are uneconomical at that level that could have been better than nothing for many people. That being said, there's been an enormous push by various business groups to do everything they can to keep wages low. It's a complicated issue and one can't propose solutions without acknowledging that there's a LOT of nuance...
      - jfindper 10mo ago
        >but not everybody who works minimum wage needs to make a living wage I think this is a distraction that is usually rolled out to derail conversations about living wages. Not saying that you're doing that here, but it's often the case when the "teenager flipping burgers" argument is brought up. Typically in conversations about living wages, people are talking about financially independent adults trying to make their way through life without starving while working 40 hours per week. I don't think anyone is seriously promoting a living wage for the benefit of financially dependent minors. And, in any case, the solution could also be (totally, or in part) a reduction in expenses instead of increase in income. >It's a complicated issue and one can't propose solutions without acknowledging that there's a LOT of nuance... That's for sure! I know it's not getting solved on the hacker news comment section, at least.
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  You're identifying the right problem (school and housing costs are completely out of hand) but then resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down. The easy way to realize this is to notice that the median wage has increased by proportionally less than the federal minimum wage has. The people in the middle can't afford school or housing either. And what happens if you increase the minimum wage faster than overall wages? Costs go up even more, and so does unemployment when small businesses who are also paying those high real estate costs now also have to pay a higher minimum wage. You're basically requesting the annihilation of the middle class. Whereas you make housing cost less and that helps the people at the bottom and the people in the middle.
  - jfindper 10mo ago
    >resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down. I'm not really resorting to any solution. My comment is pointing out that when you only do one side of the equation (income) without considering the other side (expenses), it's worthless. Especially when you are trying to make a comparison across years. How we go about fixing the problem, if we ever do, is another conversation. But my original comment doesn't attempt to suggest any solution, especially not one that "requests the annihilation of the middle class". It's solely to point out that adventured's comment is a bunch of meaningless numbers.
    - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
      > It's solely to point out that adventured's comment is a bunch of meaningless numbers. The point of that comment was to point out that minimum wage is irrelevant because basically nobody makes that anyway; even the entry-level jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage. In that context, arguing that the higher-than-minimum wages people are actually getting still aren't sufficient implies an argument that the minimum wage should be higher than that. And people could read it that way even if it's not what you intended. So what I'm pointing out is that that's the wrong solution and doing that rather than addressing the real issue (high costs) is the thing that destroys the middle class.
- reissbaker 10mo ago
  This will probably be an unpopular reply, but "real median household income" — aka, inflation-adjusted median income — has steadily risen since the 90s and is currently at an all-time high in the United States. [1] Inflation includes the cost of housing (by measuring the cost of rent). However, we are living through a housing supply crisis, and while overall cost of living hasn't gone up, housing's share of that has massively multiplied. We would all be living much richer lives if we could bring down the cost of housing — or at least have it flatline, and let inflation take care of the rest. Education is interesting, since most people don't actually pay the list price. The list price has gone up a lot, but the percentage of people paying list price has similarly gone down a lot: from over 50% in the 90s for state schools to 26% today, thanks to a large increase in subsidy programs (student aid). While real education costs have still gone up somewhat, they've gone up much less than the prices you're quoting lead you to believe: those are essentially a tax on the rich who don't qualify for student aid. [2] 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N 2: https://econofact.org/how-much-does-college-really-cost https://econofact.org/how-much-does-college-really-cost
  - jfindper 10mo ago
    I have several qualms with how the real median household income is calculated, specifically the consumer price index. But I agree that tackling housing alone would be significant.
    - reissbaker 10mo ago
      I think everyone has quibbles about the CPI. Ultimately though, it would take a lot of cherry-picking to make it seem like overall cost of living has gone up 3x while wages have gone up less. As a counterexample, an NES game in 1990 cost $50 new (in 1990 dollars! Not adjusted for inflation). Battlefield 6 cost $70 new this year (in 2025 dollars), and there were widespread complaints about games getting "too expensive." In real terms games have become massively less expensive — especially considering that the budget for Battlefield 6 was $400MM, and the budget for Super Mario World in 1990 was less than $2MM. There are a zillion examples like this. Housing has gone way up adjusted for inflation, but many other things have gone way, way down adjusted for inflation. I think it's hard to make a case that overall cost of living has gone up faster than median wages, and the federal reports indicate the opposite: median real income has been going up steadily for decades. Housing cost is visible and (of course, since it's gone up so much) painful. But real median income is not underwater relative to the 90s. And there's always outrage when something costs more than it used to, even if that's actually cheaper adjusted for inflation: for example, the constant outrage about videogame prices, which have in fact massively declined despite requiring massively more labor to make and sell.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
mossTechnician 10mo ago
In addition to the other comments, I presume the big box retailers do not hire for full-time positions when they don't have to, and gig economy work is rapidly replacing jobs that used to be minimum wage.
yndoendo 10mo ago
My uncle was running a number of fast food restaurants for a franchise owner making millions. His statement about this topic is simple, "they are not living wage jobs ... go into manufacturing if you want a living wage". I don't like my uncle at all and find him and people like him to be terrible human beings.
- The-Bus 10mo ago
  If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. I, too, could become fabulously wealthy selling shoes if someone just have me shoes for $1 so I could resell them for $50.
  - CamperBob2 10mo ago
    Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently. A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - autoexec 10mo ago
      > A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality. Anyone working for someone else, doing literally anything for 40 hours a week, should be entitled to enough compensation to support themselves at a minimum. Any employer offering less than that is either a failed business that should die off and make room for one that's better managed or a corporation that is just using public taxpayer money to subsidize their private labor expenses.
    - 10mo ago
zzzeek 10mo ago
in that case it should be completely uncontroversial to raise the minimum wage and help that .5% of labor out. yet somehow, it's a non-starter. (btw, googling says the number is more like 1.1%. in 1979, 13.4% of the labor force made minimum wage. this only shows how obsolete the current minimum wage level is).

GoatInGrey 10mo ago

Counterpoint: affording average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment (~$1,675) requires that exact median full-time wage. $15 an hour affords you about $740 for monthly housing expenses. One can suggest getting two roommates for a one-bedroom apartment, but they would be missing the fact that this is very unusual for the last century. It's more in line with housing economics from the early-to-mid 19th century.

jfindper 10mo ago

>You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars. Holy moly! 11 whole dollars an hour!? Okay, so we went from $4.25 to $11.00. That's a 159% change. Awesome! Now, lets look at... School, perhaps? So I can maybe skill-up out of Little Caesars and start building a slightly more comfortable life. Median in-state tuition in 1995: $2,681. Median in-state tuation in 2025: $11,610. Wait a second! That's a 333% change. Uh oh. Should we do the same calculation with housing...? Sure, I love making myself more depressed. 1995: $114,600. 2025: $522,200. 356% change. Fuck.

genewitch 10mo ago
1980 mustang vs 2025 mustang is what i usually use. in the past 12 years my price per KWh electricity costs have doubled. in the mid 90s you could open a CD (certificate of deposit at a bank or credit union) and get 9% or more APY. savings accounts had ~4% interest. in the mid 90s a gallon of gasoline in Los Angeles county was $0.899 in the summer and less than that any other time. It's closer to $4.50 now.
mrits 10mo ago
The BBQ place across the street from me pays $19/hour to be a cashier in Austin. Or the sign says it does anyways
- jfindper 10mo ago
  sweet! according to austintexas.gov, that's only $2.63 below the 2024 living wage. $5.55 below, if you use the MIT numbers for 2025. As long as you don't run into anything unforseen like medical expenses, car breakdowns, etc., you can almost afford a bare-bones, mediocre life with no retirement savings.
  - hylaride 10mo ago
    I don't disagree that there has been a huge issue with stagnant wages, but not everybody who works minimum wage needs to make a living wage. Some are teenagers, people just looking for part time work, etc. Pushing up minimum wage too high can risk destroying jobs that are uneconomical at that level that could have been better than nothing for many people. That being said, there's been an enormous push by various business groups to do everything they can to keep wages low. It's a complicated issue and one can't propose solutions without acknowledging that there's a LOT of nuance...
    - jfindper 10mo ago
      >but not everybody who works minimum wage needs to make a living wage I think this is a distraction that is usually rolled out to derail conversations about living wages. Not saying that you're doing that here, but it's often the case when the "teenager flipping burgers" argument is brought up. Typically in conversations about living wages, people are talking about financially independent adults trying to make their way through life without starving while working 40 hours per week. I don't think anyone is seriously promoting a living wage for the benefit of financially dependent minors. And, in any case, the solution could also be (totally, or in part) a reduction in expenses instead of increase in income. >It's a complicated issue and one can't propose solutions without acknowledging that there's a LOT of nuance... That's for sure! I know it's not getting solved on the hacker news comment section, at least.
AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
You're identifying the right problem (school and housing costs are completely out of hand) but then resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down. The easy way to realize this is to notice that the median wage has increased by proportionally less than the federal minimum wage has. The people in the middle can't afford school or housing either. And what happens if you increase the minimum wage faster than overall wages? Costs go up even more, and so does unemployment when small businesses who are also paying those high real estate costs now also have to pay a higher minimum wage. You're basically requesting the annihilation of the middle class. Whereas you make housing cost less and that helps the people at the bottom and the people in the middle.
- jfindper 10mo ago
  >resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down. I'm not really resorting to any solution. My comment is pointing out that when you only do one side of the equation (income) without considering the other side (expenses), it's worthless. Especially when you are trying to make a comparison across years. How we go about fixing the problem, if we ever do, is another conversation. But my original comment doesn't attempt to suggest any solution, especially not one that "requests the annihilation of the middle class". It's solely to point out that adventured's comment is a bunch of meaningless numbers.
  - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > It's solely to point out that adventured's comment is a bunch of meaningless numbers. The point of that comment was to point out that minimum wage is irrelevant because basically nobody makes that anyway; even the entry-level jobs pay more than the federal minimum wage. In that context, arguing that the higher-than-minimum wages people are actually getting still aren't sufficient implies an argument that the minimum wage should be higher than that. And people could read it that way even if it's not what you intended. So what I'm pointing out is that that's the wrong solution and doing that rather than addressing the real issue (high costs) is the thing that destroys the middle class.
reissbaker 10mo ago
This will probably be an unpopular reply, but "real median household income" — aka, inflation-adjusted median income — has steadily risen since the 90s and is currently at an all-time high in the United States. [1] Inflation includes the cost of housing (by measuring the cost of rent). However, we are living through a housing supply crisis, and while overall cost of living hasn't gone up, housing's share of that has massively multiplied. We would all be living much richer lives if we could bring down the cost of housing — or at least have it flatline, and let inflation take care of the rest. Education is interesting, since most people don't actually pay the list price. The list price has gone up a lot, but the percentage of people paying list price has similarly gone down a lot: from over 50% in the 90s for state schools to 26% today, thanks to a large increase in subsidy programs (student aid). While real education costs have still gone up somewhat, they've gone up much less than the prices you're quoting lead you to believe: those are essentially a tax on the rich who don't qualify for student aid. [2] 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N 2: https://econofact.org/how-much-does-college-really-cost https://econofact.org/how-much-does-college-really-cost
- jfindper 10mo ago
  I have several qualms with how the real median household income is calculated, specifically the consumer price index. But I agree that tackling housing alone would be significant.
  - reissbaker 10mo ago
    I think everyone has quibbles about the CPI. Ultimately though, it would take a lot of cherry-picking to make it seem like overall cost of living has gone up 3x while wages have gone up less. As a counterexample, an NES game in 1990 cost $50 new (in 1990 dollars! Not adjusted for inflation). Battlefield 6 cost $70 new this year (in 2025 dollars), and there were widespread complaints about games getting "too expensive." In real terms games have become massively less expensive — especially considering that the budget for Battlefield 6 was $400MM, and the budget for Super Mario World in 1990 was less than $2MM. There are a zillion examples like this. Housing has gone way up adjusted for inflation, but many other things have gone way, way down adjusted for inflation. I think it's hard to make a case that overall cost of living has gone up faster than median wages, and the federal reports indicate the opposite: median real income has been going up steadily for decades. Housing cost is visible and (of course, since it's gone up so much) painful. But real median income is not underwater relative to the 90s. And there's always outrage when something costs more than it used to, even if that's actually cheaper adjusted for inflation: for example, the constant outrage about videogame prices, which have in fact massively declined despite requiring massively more labor to make and sell.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

mossTechnician 10mo ago

In addition to the other comments, I presume the big box retailers do not hire for full-time positions when they don't have to, and gig economy work is rapidly replacing jobs that used to be minimum wage.

yndoendo 10mo ago

My uncle was running a number of fast food restaurants for a franchise owner making millions. His statement about this topic is simple, "they are not living wage jobs ... go into manufacturing if you want a living wage". I don't like my uncle at all and find him and people like him to be terrible human beings.

The-Bus 10mo ago
If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. I, too, could become fabulously wealthy selling shoes if someone just have me shoes for $1 so I could resell them for $50.
- CamperBob2 10mo ago
  Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently. A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    > A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality. Anyone working for someone else, doing literally anything for 40 hours a week, should be entitled to enough compensation to support themselves at a minimum. Any employer offering less than that is either a failed business that should die off and make room for one that's better managed or a corporation that is just using public taxpayer money to subsidize their private labor expenses.
  - 10mo ago

zzzeek 10mo ago

in that case it should be completely uncontroversial to raise the minimum wage and help that .5% of labor out. yet somehow, it's a non-starter. (btw, googling says the number is more like 1.1%. in 1979, 13.4% of the labor force made minimum wage. this only shows how obsolete the current minimum wage level is).