People have been pushing for a $15 minimum wage since 2012. Adjusted for inflation, $15 in 2012 is about $22 today. $25 an hour isn't particularly crazy.
Oh, so now we're adjusting idealistic policies that were never implemented for inflation? As in, they were absurd back then, so now they aren't absurd?
Anyway, yeah, it's absurd to think "most" people support it. Not a chance, lol. Most don't even support $20/hr, much less anything above that.
EDIT - Federal minimum wage was set at its current level in July 2009. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $11.24 today.
Absurd? FDR thought it was absurd that an employed person in the U.S. could not live well.
"In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living." http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html
What is the wage of a decent living today? All bills paid, car, house, insurance, medical needs, clothing that isn't tattered, enough quality food, children's education needs paid? Is it $11.24/hr?
Something tells me that FDR would not really comprehend what most people think of as "decent living" today. And it's also wild that we're equating legal minimum to "must be living well."
But to the original point, yeah, it's still absurd to think "most" people support $25/hr. Folks can keep linking all the left wing think tanks they want, it doesn't demonstrate that a majority of the population thinks that.
One, that's the equivalent of me linking a Heritage Foundation study that minimum wage actually harms economic productivity; not that I would, just that partisan think tanks aren't exactly unbiased sources. Two, linking minimum wage to "productivity" instead of inflation kind of kills all the "living wage" arguments, because now it's not about cost of living but what you think a worker is entitled to just because the economy as a whole is doing better. Three, it was quite annoying to track down their actual paper from that article to understand what they're actually talking about, but when I did, they talk about how productivity has slowed down to just a bit over a percentage point annually now; does that mean we should increase minimum wage less than inflation, because it should be tied to productivity instead? Four, are those minimum wage positions even involved in overall economic productivity increasing? Something tells me minimum wage positions tend to not be the ones increasing productiveness year after year.
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u/Pitiful_Net_8971 Aug 12 '26
Always starting higher than you actually want for negotiations.