No One Willing To Work Should Be Paid A Poverty Wage

 Inflation has made life hard for everyone but the rich. While the rich get much richer, most other Americans are lucky if their wage gains can just equal the rising inflation.

Since 2009, inflation has driven prices up by 46.6%. A dollar today will only buy about 68% of what it would buy in 2009. It's no wonder that inflation is one of the major issues in the 2024 campaign.

But while everyone (except the rich) is hurt by this, no one is hurt more than workers making the national minimum wage. In 2009, the minimum wage was raised to $7.25 an hour (about $290 a week or $15,080 a year). That's a wage that keeps a worker in poverty.

It is estimated that a worker should pay no more than 25% to 30% of their income to rent an apartment. But there is no state in the country where workers making the minimum wage can rent a decent apartment. Housing alone will eat up most of the minimum wage - leaving little to nothing for food, transportation, and other expenses. Not for a single person and especially not for a family.

The minimum wage should be raised to a wage that will lift workers out of poverty. The most often mentioned figure is $15.00 an hour. You might think that's a big jump (more than double the current minimum wage). It is, but it's the minimum needed to lift workers out of poverty.

A $15.00 an hour minimum wage would be about $31,200 a year. That's still less than half of the country's median wage (about $75,000). But it would allow a family to rise out of poverty and have a minimally decent standard of living.

Democrats have been trying to raise the minimum wage for several years now, but they have been blocked at every turn by Republicans. While Republicans want to give billionaires more tax breaks, they don't care about the millions of hard-working Americans living in poverty.

Do you think people willing to work hard should be paid a wage that keeps them in poverty? If you don't, then you should go to the polls in November and vote to put a Democrat in the White House - and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. 

In a rich nation like the United States, all citizens should share in the rising productivity - not just the millionaires and billionaires.