>

My man!
It's more that we need to embrace change beyond paychecks. The right to life, liberty, and happiness must mean the right to food, shelter, education, health care at a minimum. Paycheck adjustments should be the determining factor between a US based vacation vs a European vacation, not whether someone gets to sleep in their car or under a bridge. >

This person empathizes. >

My life has been a roller-coaster. I get it. I definitely get it. >

Cue the cries of FIRST THEY WANTED 15 NOW IT'S 25. WHY NOT GIVE THEM A BILLION DOLLARS AN HOUR. malarkey the reps love to spill. >

He is correct.  $$15 an hour won't work either. 


$15/hr full time = 31000/year


$26,000 after taxes


Rent is $18,000 ($1500/mo)


Food is $3600 ($300/mo)


Electricity + Phone + Internet is $3000 ($250/month)


Congratulations, you are out of money.


Clothes? Gas? Car Payment? Maintenance? Insurance? Entertainment/Leisure? Unexpected expenses?
Oh...don't forget that you have no health insurance and are one accident/medical emergency away from total financial collapse.
u/PorkTornado >

I live in the Bay Area where $15 an hour is minimum wage. $1500 a month wouldn’t even get you your own shitty studio unless you were extremely lucky.
Our combined water and gas/electricity bill for an 800 sqft, 1 bath apartment with two occupants is already nearly $200 a month… And that’s only because we never turn the heater on and work to conserve water… we were actually praised by the water service for being in the top 20% of water conserving households.
Our fiber internet should be $39, but with all the random fees and taxes the county adds on it’s more like $55, and my phone bill isn’t even included in that… And the Internet will get more expensive next year because we had a sign on discount, probably to around $60-70.
All this to say, I am fortunate in that I make a decent wage, but it is rough out here and $15 an hour absolutely isn’t enough. >

I live in a tourist area, and our McDonalds already pays $17 to start. >

I do wonder how many people are actually making minimum wage now. It’s so far below market, and most states have higher minimums, so it’s almost completely irrelevant. >

According to BLS statistics (warning: pdf), about 1.1 million people are being paid at or below the federal minimum wage. 

In 2021, 76.1 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 55.8 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 181,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 910,000 workers had wages below the federal minimum. >

That statistic is going to be skewed because most states minimum wage is higher than the federal.  And they are states with large populations like California and New York. >

I remember when I was once against raising the minimum wage until I was taught about it going up with production until it just didn't. There is no excuse to not raise minimum wage at this point in juncture. >

He’s right. Needs to be at least $25 in some parts of the country with the cost of living now. >

$15 was barely a living wage when the fight for $15 started. $14 a decade later is an insult. >

Yeah, always worth repeating "Fight for 15" started in 2011. >

Y'all took too long. >

He brought up a $15 minimum wage back around 2015. That's about 8 years ago. In todays dollars a $15 minimum wage would be almost $19/hour. >

Yeah I mean at this point we’ve been having this conversation so long 15 is a lowball. Even the proposed 17 is too >

That's what happens when it's been almost 14 years since the last minimum wage increase. >

I'd love to make $2/hour more than I make now. >

Wages, including minimum wage, should match productivity. What if, instead of being expressed in dollars, wages were expressed in relation to the country's per-capita GDP? The dollar equivalent would get automatically adjusted each time either population and/or GDP are officially calculated, eliminating much of the need for constant wage re-evaluation. >

Okay. I’m just going to come out and say it. $50 an hour and then we wait a century for everything else to catch up. 
It’s kind of what they’re doing with the national debt but actually useful. >

Modern American politics in a nutshell: a nasty, partisan battle for an outdated solution that should have happened a decade or more ago, may still not happen (or at least will require further erosion of the solution via "compromise" to satisfy ideologues) and, like many (most?) modern problems, traces back to Ronald Reagan.