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?
Fuck off
Yeah I stopped reading there. So condescending.
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.