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.
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.
President Felon will change the poverty threshold to $0.15 to prove everyone is doing excellent.
That’s been a poverty wage for at least 15 years.
Yeah, the “$15 minimum wage” conversation has been going on for so long that the actual number adjusted for inflation would be well into the mid $20 range. IIRC, it would currently land somewhere around $24.75 per hour.
And if the idea of a $24.75 minimum wage makes you balk, maybe you should consider how little you’re being paid for the work you do, when compared to what the minimum wage used to cover. It used to cover enough for a single full time worker to afford housing, utilities, food, and a car. If you’re struggling to do that and you’re making in the mid $20’s, then congrats you know how it felt to be paid minimum wage when it was introduced.
Kill all rich people.
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!
My prediction for 2026
still a whole lot of 2025 to go
Poverty doesn’t exist if you don’t define meterics for it.
That’s exactly the point.
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.
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.
You can call me whatever the fuck you want if I can afford food housing healthcare retirement and a bit extra on top.
“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?
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.
Can’t tell if centrist or republican.
What’s wrong with that analysis?
Nothing, if you’re either a centrist or a republican.
because they don’t have the mental capacity to organize themselves.
Fuck off
Yeah I stopped reading there. So condescending.
That’s part of the argument. If it is condescending to you then no minimum wage is needed because minimum wage workers could form a union.
May Day is the perfect day to educate one’s self about the history of union suppression. If you think you see a pattern, you’re right, but the reasons for the pattern have nothing to do with the workers’ abilities and everything to do with powerful people using everything in their arsenal to prevent collective action.
MLK was killed because he was trying to overcome the suppression. It is the workers’ abilities because leaders could have picked up where he was stopped. There are no leaders, which to me means, there are no abilities.
Yeah, “mental capacity” is the main hurdle for minimum wage workers to unionize… Fuck off.
What else?
Where does that threshold come from though? Like is it adjusted accordingly with inflation or is it just a made up number from 1993?
Because seeing the effects of the tariffs this number should’ve doubled in the past months.
Ain’t seen nothing yet, price adjustments after tariffs gonna make middle class in great depression queues.
But eggs’ll be cheap, right?
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
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK
“They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Hosea 8:7
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.
Raising minimum wage and housing would be an easy political platform to stand on but, of course, politicians are beholden to the rich.
It would be an easy platform for democrats to stand on if they hadn’t thrown away all of their credibility on the matter.
With most states having their own minimum wages higher than the federal one, how relevant is this really?
Thank you for the response from the Democratic Party.
Fuck workers in red states. They deserve it for being outnumbered.
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
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
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
Should be Skibidi Idaho
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.
- 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
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.
I’m kind of more shocked at $16,000 a year is considered above poverty.
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.
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.
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.
Better cut the top tax bracket and corp taxes some more
I mean, it’s just a matter of time before it starts trickling down, right?
Right??
Your comments are not federating properly to my instance, but I found the link. Thanks for sharing it, I enjoyed it immensely. =D
07 🟥
You’re welcome. I’ve had issues with comments not federating too. Can you please let your instance admin know, so they can address the issue? Thanks so much.
CEOs read “minimum wage” and they think “maximum wage”.
It’s just a branding issue. /s
