Happy 14th Anniversary To The Last Time We Raised The Minimum Wage!

This is the longest time we've gone without raising it since it was first established.

As of today, it has been 14 years since the federal minimum wage was raised, the longest amount of time since it has been raised since it was first established in 1938. That’s pretty bad! What’s worse is that it is pretty unlikely to ever be raised again, because as much as most Americans agree that we should raise the minimum wage, it’s been so long since we raised it that in order to get it to something remotely in line with our historical norms it would have to be raised a lot more than Republicans would be willing to go for.

Sixty-two percent of Americans favor raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, but the last time Republicans even offered to budge on it, Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton offered a paltry $10 … by 2025. If the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 2009, it would be worth $10.30 today, so that’s not exactly the greatest offer in the world. Especially since the minimum wage in 1968 ($1.60), had it kept up with inflation, would be worth $14.03 an hour today.

I wrote an article back in 2013 about how a budget created by McDonald’s for its employees illustrated how impossible it was to get by on the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour — which is what the fast-food joint was paying back then.

The budget was meant to show it was entirely possible to do it, and yet also required someone to work full-time at McDonald’s and 34 hours at another minimum wage job in order to just barely cover an imaginary and impossible-to-actually-live-on budget that vastly underestimated or completely missed several fairly necessary expenses.

As I noted at the time:

And what do you get for working 74 hours a week? Well, you don’t get heat, clearly. There’s a big ol’ zero next to the heat in that chart. In my building– we have separate checks for gas and electric– that would mean that not only do you not get to heat and cool your home, but also that you do not get to heat your water, or cook on your stove, if you have a gas stove (I do).

Also noticeably absent in this budget? Food. And gas. There’s a line for a car payment, but not for gas. Which is suspect, because if you’re working two jobs it’s possible you will pay more for your gas than you’d be paying for your car.

Also… health insurance for $20 a month? There is really no such thing as health insurance for $20 a month if you’re buying your health insurance on your own. I think the least amount is going to be about $215 a month– and that only covers hospital emergencies.

It was not long after that was published that the Fight For 15 movement started. That was 10 years ago. Ten years ago we were pointing out that the minimum wage was not enough and fighting for people to get $15 an hour — and those numbers that were ludicrous then are even more ridiculous now.

There is not one place in this entire country where a human being can live on $7.25 an hour. Not one. Even in Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation, the living wage for a single person with zero dependents is $15.42. Wheeler County, Georgia, is the county with the lowest per capita personal income. The living wage there for a single person with zero dependents would be $15 an hour. In Buffalo County, South Dakota, the county with the lowest median household income, it would be $14.75 an hour.

There is, essentially, nowhere in America where a single person without dependents can live and cover their basic necessities for under $15 an hour, and yet nearly 52 million of us — 32 percent of the country — do make less than that. And many of them do have dependents.

It is objectively ridiculous for the minimum wage to be less than what a single person with no dependents can live on in the poorest areas of our country. It does not make sense. The argument that it’s “for teenagers” also makes zero sense given that we all expect most places to be open during school hours. Also given that over half of minimum wage earners in the United States are over the age of 24.

We also very much need people to do these jobs and cannot function as a society without them, as we learned during the beginning of the pandemic. The jobs we cannot live without people doing are the jobs that pay the least. Look at how certain people whined in the days after the lockdowns when their favorite places were still shut down because no one wanted to work for nothing anymore. Look at how they whine about people being homeless while simultaneously opposing rent control or, you know, just housing people.

So just to be clear, the Right is endlessly annoyed by the fact that some people require government assistance in order to survive, but they don’t want to require businesses to pay people a living wage or live without people doing the jobs that do not pay a living wage. There is no possible way for that to work. It is not humanly possible for things to work the way the Right would like them to. As much as they want to call us idealists, it is not just idealistic to think you can have a purely capitalist society in which businesses can pay people less than they need to live and have no trouble finding people willing to work for that little and no one is on government assistance and no one is homeless (for aesthetic reasons, not because they actually care about those people), it’s impossible. It cannot be.

It would be easy enough for those of us who do live in states with higher minimum wages to just say “Whatever, we’ve got ours!” but this is no way for anyone to live. We can do better and we should do better. It should not be radical to say that anyone working 40 hours a week — regardless of what they are doing — should make enough to cover their basic necessities. They should have a home, transportation, food and health care.

And no one can do that on $7.25 an hour.

OPEN THREAD!