min wage used to go up more often because min wage going up happened pretty often and was normalized. then it stopped and we're trying to live in 2021 with a 1960 paycheck

did you know the purchasing power of minimum wage is less than 30% of what it was in 1968? Like if you worked min wage in 1968 you had 30%+ more actual real money in your bank.

one of the reasons they dont spend a lot of time teaching you economics in school is one day you'd figure out that every year there isn't a min wage bump is a year your company pays you less while making more.

Min Wage last rose in 2009, when it jumped from $6.55 to $7.25. $7.25 today is worth *less than $6* in 2009 buying power terms. But wait, it gets worse. The bump was only fixing a 10 year stall in min wage raises. $7.25 today is $4.63 in 1999. Min wage in 1999? $5.25.

Don't get me started on "tipped wage". Wanna know when that was last increased? 1991. From $2.03 to $2.13.

Here's a handy chart that shows you what you probably already know. We earn less than "burger flippers" did in the 90s, and the 80s, we're earning a *pathetic* amount since the 70s and 60s. The exact time most of these ghouls grew up in.

When you hear about how a burger job really built character and taught discipline and really helped that person grow and they think its important for some reason that that job should be paid roughly what they remember earning, keep in mind they were prolly earning more than 15/hr

None of this even touches stuff like how its legal to pay disabled people less than minimum wage, or the productivity explosions, or how they justify this with "benefits" which are only so "valuable" cause of the artificially inflated medical scam in the US.

that last point needs a lot of room to explain but

benefits only bridge the gap if you think it actually costs $10,000 to get your blood pressure taken or w/e. It's a scam. If I said you get $100,000/year but $95,000 of that was in magic beans I set the price for, like?????????

and on production, here's another fun graph. Overlay this with the wage graph for a fun time. This is just industrial production, but you can find a graph for whatever industry you wanna look at. So we make more stuff, work roughly the same hours, and our wages are stagnant. Why?

If Jeff Bezo's income had been increased relative to minimum wage, he would currently be worth $10,038,563,143. That's a little less than the $200,000,000,000 he is actually worth today.