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.
How should it be possible to leave poverty behind with minimum wage? It’s the minimum. Only people without work can have less.
It’s unfortunate but those who make the least are inevitable the ones who are poor. Not calling it poor is misleading.
“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?
You can call me whatever the fuck you want if I can afford food housing healthcare retirement and a bit extra on top.
The minimum wage was not established to decide who is poor and who is not, but rather to eliminate poverty as a concept.
Poor is not defined as those who have the least in the economic terms being discussed in this article. That’s why there is a poverty line to define what is meant by poor. The poverty line used by the government needs to be updated however.
If people had more than enough to get by then we wouldn’t considered them poor even if no one had less money than them. Having the least amount of money isn’t the issue. The issue is can a person acquire the goods and services they need to live. If not that’s a problem and we’ve been describing that problem as being poor.
Raising minimum wage and housing would be an easy political platform to stand on but, of course, politicians are beholden to the rich.
Linebaugh points to the influential words of August Spies, one of the convicted men, who just before his execution cried out the famous words: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
That’s a powerful quote. I remember going to local May Day fairs and maybe celebrating it in elementary school. Those events definitely did not cover any of this fascinating history about worker’s rights.
The YouTube link I posted used to be sang at May Day events too, but you know, "I like Ike!”
Trump disbands DHHS
No more poverty!
Poverty doesn’t exist if you don’t define meterics for it.
That’s exactly the point.
My prediction for 2026
still a whole lot of 2025 to go
The federal poverty standard is horribly low. Like you’re still on the brink of homeless at twice that wage.
I always liked the definition of financially stable to be at a state where you can weather two major life events at the same time and not be devastating. Replace a vehicle and pay your max out of pocket for health insurance at the same time.
What we find is that so many of us are one bad day away from doom.
It’s like 70% or something of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. It’s crazy, but we all keep voting in the same group of assholes who haven’t changed a thing in decades. So frustrating.
Edit: The first site I saw (I have no idea if it’s credible or not) says “seventy-seven percent of workers in America would experience financial difficulty if their paycheck were delayed a week” - source
What’s even more disturbing is when you think of how much savings would be needed to weather the storm. If your car is totalled and you had to find something, one of the adult a loses their job and you have to cover a month or three of life. We are taking tens of thousands of dollars.
But maybe even worse is how quickly that can be replaced. If shot hits the fan and you survived, how long are you vulnerable? Two years? A decade of saving?
When you look at the top 10% of society there just aren’t that many problems that could cause them to be homeless in 24hrs.
It’s great because a lot of people don’t realize there’s a sub minimum wage as well ☺️.
30$ in tips per month is all it takes to allow the sub minimum wage to be paid in a bunch of states.
The sub minimum wage is 2 dollars. Yup. 2 dollars an hour.
BBbbbbBbBbBUt you’re A peeec of Sshhhiiit for not supporting tipping ermahgerd some anecdote can make more with tips than a fair wage therefore fuck it all hurr durr
I’m kind of more shocked at $16,000 a year is considered above poverty.
Woah 16k gross? That’s wild.
Maybe if rent was… Checks notes $395 a month.
Then you’d have $9,500 a year, so $790 a month to spend on everything else. Let’s say you then buy only flour for sustenance… AI said $27 per month to eat just flour.
Which leaves you with $763 a month for entertainment.
What are these people even complaining about?
Maybe don’t eat golden sushi and crack cocaine for every meal Jesus
Think of how many pieces of Avocado toast you get for $763/month: these people are living the life!
You could literally just grow your own avocados and use the unlimited flour to make your own toast, thats like infinite money. Why are poor people so stupid and useless? It’s like all they do is buy drugs and alcohol and beg the rich/moral people to pay for it and do everything for them. I can’t believe how lazy some people are.
Still /s, in case that isn’t clear enough
/s if you’re really THAT dense.
The numbers are all made up, and they’ve not kept track with inflation or the economy in a long time. Things like “minimum wage” simply lingered to allow those better off that sometimes have a conscience to sleep at night, thinking there is a system in place for the less fortunate. Our Federal government has been failing us longer than Mango Mussolini’s presence, he is simply baring and accelerating the asshattery.
The poverty line was historically measured simply by multiplying the USDA’s cheapest food plan for a household to buy groceries with adequate nutrition, and multiplying by 3.
Then, in the intervening 6 decades or so, food inflation has gone up significantly slower than housing inflation, to where that simple assumption of “barely enough to eat, times 3” began systematically understating actual poverty.
Today, feeding the reference family of 4 (2 adults 20-50, 1 kid aged 6-8, 1 aged 9-11) costs $996.20 per month (as of March 2025). That’s basically $12,000 per year, so the poverty line for a family of 4 is $32,150 (updated every January with September data).
So cost of rent/mortgage is excluded.
Then the state provides a shelter, right?You can maybe wait three + years for a Section 8 voucher!
If applying for that is anything like applying for unemployment, good luck lol.
In some places, that’s on a lottery system.
Ain’t seen nothing yet, price adjustments after tariffs gonna make middle class in great depression queues.
Pretty sure that’s the point of project 2025, so everyone is too poor and stuck to fight the dictatorship and no one else can get ahead forcing the them to be a cog in the machine for the 1% until they’re dead
Jokes on them.
More people who feel they have nothing to live for are more people who are willing to go to extreme measures to punish the ones who put them in that position.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK
“They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Hosea 8:7
But eggs’ll be cheap, right?
President Felon will change the poverty threshold to $0.15 to prove everyone is doing excellent.
CEOs read “minimum wage” and they think “maximum wage”.
It’s just a branding issue. /s
$15k a year??? That wouldn’t even cover my food let alone a shitty hotel room. Anything below $50k as a single earner is deep in poverty.
Yes, it sounds bad. But there is a bright side, too! The week has 168 hours, which means if you work four full time jobs, you can make $60k a year and you still get eight hours of sleep! /s
those are some top-tier grustle tips
IIRC, the federal poverty level doesn’t account for housing, transport, utilities, etc… It basically only accounts for food. And even then, it only accounts for the cheapest of the cheap food; You’d basically be eating white rice and instant ramen every day.
What absolute dumbass thought that would be a good metric to track?
probably economists and politicians, transit is hard to quantify a minimum of because walking is a technical option in many situations.
the goal was to enforce poverty, not to resolve it. this is the system working exactly as intended
Manipulative liars/vampires who don’t think of poor people are deserving of any kindness or luxury.
Builds strong deficiencies
Dont forget to thank Mr. MSG
With most states having their own minimum wages higher than the federal one, how relevant is this really?
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
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
There’s not a single place in the US where you can “live decently” on 7.25/ hr.
Thank you for the response from the Democratic Party.
Fuck workers in red states. They deserve it for being outnumbered.
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.
Boy, fuck Idaho apparently
Yeah it’s bleak there for a lot of reasons. Fun fact Idaho potatoes involve a lot of prison labor
- 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
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.
Nowhere in the country can you afford rent on minimum wage. Not in cities, not in small towns, not in bum fuck nowheresville cheapest red state with no single public services .
Extremely
The solution is obviously to abolish HHS.
The criteria must be wrong because by these metrics half of Americans are below poverty!
by these metrics half of Americans are below poverty!
I mean yeah sure, if we just throw around a random percentage, the metrics are the problem.
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.
$7.25 has been poverty wages for over a decade.
Triple that and it’s still a poverty wage in many parts of California.
Minimum wage in California is $16.50 though. For fast food workers it’s $20
