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.
Please don’t ignore my second paragraph.
Your second paragraph is an admission that you have no better ideas but want to abandon minimum wage anyway. That’s basically an admission that you don’t want people to be able to earn a living.
Seems like you don’t know this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
I think I point out the obstacle to people making a living. There is no easy answer. Rising minumum wage sounds easy but as I wrote, it is a distraction.
“Let the corporations exploit people” is a pretty easy answer. It requires no effort and you don’t have to waste time supporting the interests of those unwashed mental deficients you don’t want to earn a living.
Please read the article. It’s one of the most important things to know.
I have read the article, and I don’t see where it supports your disregard for the wages of people you consider beneath you.
I don’t have that disregard. My point is that the supply of jobs has to be increased instead of setting a lower bound on wages.
Focussing on minimum wages makes workers ignore how they are controlled and how they can increase their wages without having to rely on benevolence. To me, that’s disregardful.
And you have admitted that you have no solution in that direction. But you still want to abandon the only mitigation we have.
Frankly, I think you just want to abandon the minimum wage and I don’t trust anything else you’re saying on the matter. Put the measures you want in place first. Until then, fuck anyone who wants to forego raising the minimum wage to a livable wage. I get that exploiting workers is very popular among republicans, centrists, and anyone else who sees workers as resources to be exploited rather than people.
Jobs can always be created by lowering interest rates. It’s just not in the hand of the workers to change, neither is minimum wage.
You don’t have to trust anything I said. I am telling you about market mechanisms that you can verify on your own.
You are right that I want to abandon minimum wage, or rather the need for minimum wage. I want the demand for work to rise to the point that workers earn livable wages that are secured by the demand for their work.
You can try to rise minimum wages however much you want. My point is that your time is better spent on rising demand for workers. Marx is telling you how that works. You definitely don’t have to trust me on that.