It's been stuck at $7.25 since 2009 while rent has doubled in most cities. Would $20 an hour finally let full-time workers survive, or wipe out the small businesses that employ them? Make your case.
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Add your commentMy daughter just aged off my insurance at 26. She works retail in Denver, makes $15.27 an hour. Her cheapest marketplace plan is $310 a month. Her studio apartment is $1,450. She has $0 in savings. She has a college degree. I don't want to hear that the system is working.
My husband and I both work. Two jobs between us, we clear maybe $34k a year in rural Kentucky. People act like that's fine because "cost of living is lower here." Sure, groceries are cheaper. But our car insurance, our prescription meds, our internet bill — those aren't cheaper. Utilities went up 22% last winter. $20 an hour would change our lives and I am tired of being told our lives don't deserve to change.
i work at a gas station in rural kentucky. $20 an hour would literally double my wage overnight. people acting like thats gonna destroy the economy clearly never had to choose between their electric bill and groceries
Retired union electrician here. My apprentice wages in 1987 — adjusted for inflation — come out to about $23 an hour today. I started my career earning more in real terms than these kids are being asked to consider too high. Let that sink in.
does anyone else find it weird that we index congressional salaries to inflation automatically but we've let the minimum wage erode for 15 years without a vote? almost like the people who'd have to vote on it are insulated from the consequences of not doing so.
I'm a nurse. 12 years of school and clinical hours, I make $34 an hour. A cashier making $20 would be fine with me honestly — it's not like my wage stops existing when theirs goes up. This weird competitive scarcity mindset around wages is exactly what keeps all of us underpaid.
My mom worked two minimum wage jobs my entire childhood. Cleaned offices at night, cashiered days. We still had years where the lights got shut off. She did everything right. She worked constantly. The system failed her, not the other way around. I will never accept the framing that poverty is a personal failing when I watched someone work themselves half to death and still not make it.
I'll be the small business voice here. I own a bakery, 8 employees, Burlington Vermont. We already pay above $15 because we literally could not hire anyone at less. You know what? We're fine. We raised prices 7% over two years. Our regulars stayed. New people found us. Businesses that claim $20 will destroy them are often businesses running on a model that only works if workers are underpaid. That's not a business model — that's a subsidy extraction scheme.
My mom worked two minimum wage jobs my entire childhood. TWO. And we still qualified for food stamps. Something is deeply broken when a person can work 80 hours a week and still need government assistance just to eat. $20 isn't radical, it's the bare minimum of basic dignity.
Phased implementation. That's the answer everyone keeps dancing around. Nobody is saying flip a switch tomorrow and make it $20. Phase it in over 4-5 years, tie future increases to a cost-of-living index, and let businesses actually plan for it. This isn't rocket science, it's just requires politicians to stop using it as a culture war football and actually legislate.
lol at people acting like teenagers are the only ones earning minimum wage. i'm 41. i have a kid. i earn $9.10 an hour in Georgia. the 'just get a better job' crowd has never tried to job hunt while working 40 hours a week and raising a child as a single parent.
What I never see in these debates: tipped workers. Federal tipped minimum is still $2.13 an hour. TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTEEN CENTS. I waited tables for six years. Some weeks I made great money. Other weeks, between slow shifts and tip-outs, I cleared less than $400 for 40+ hours. The tipped wage system is broken and nobody talks about it.
If your full time job qualifies you for government assistance, your employer is being subsidized by taxpayers. Full stop. I don't want to hear about the brave job creators when the job they're creating requires a welfare top-up to be survivable.
I spent 22 years in HR. The businesses that claim they'll shutter if wages rise are often the same ones who found money for new signage, renovations, and the owner's new truck. Labor costs are real but they are also frequently used as a shield against scrutiny of other spending decisions.
EITC is taxpayer-funded wage subsidization for corporations. When Walmart pays $8 an hour and the government tops it up through tax credits, taxpayers are literally subsidizing Walmart's labor costs. Why are conservatives okay with that corporate welfare but not okay with making Walmart pay a living wage directly?
My grandfather supported a family of five on one factory job in 1968. The minimum wage then, adjusted for inflation, would be about $13-14 today. We've been losing ground for 55 years and people act like $15 or $20 is some crazy radical demand.
Counterpoint to everyone saying businesses will close: the states that have raised their minimums to $15+ have not seen the mass unemployment that was predicted. Washington State, California, Colorado — all still have small businesses, all still have restaurants. The apocalypse does not materialize. It never does. At some point the burden of proof shifts to the people making the dire predictions.
at some point this stops being an economics question and starts being a values question. do we believe people who work full time deserve to live with basic dignity or not. if yes the number adjusts to meet that. if no no number will ever be right. figure out which camp you're in and argue from there.
the mississippi point gets raised a lot but also mississippi has some of the highest poverty rates in the nation so maybe the current system isnt exactly crushing it for your town either
Economists have been debating minimum wage effects for decades and the honest answer is: it's complicated. Modest increases tend to show minimal job loss. But jumping from $7.25 to $20 in one shot is unprecedented and the studies simply don't tell us what happens at that magnitude. I support gradual increases with regional adjustments. Blunt federal mandates ignore the cost-of-living reality that $20 in rural Mississippi is NOT the same as $20 in San Francisco.
i work at a gas station. have for nine years. i know this stuff better than any economist who has never stood behind a register at 2am. raise it.
anyone who thinks $20/hr is 'too much' should try living on $7.25 for one month. pay your own rent, utilities, food, transportation. one month. then come back and talk to me about market forces.
With all due respect to PhDs, the workers living this don't have the luxury of waiting for academic consensus. People are choosing between medication and groceries right now. The "literature is mixed" point is a fine observation for a journal but it reads as pretty cold comfort to someone working a double shift and still qualifying for food stamps.
Can someone explain to me how we expect people to pay taxes, spend in the local economy, AND save for retirement on $7.25? Like which of those three do we want them to skip? Because right now the answer is all three and then we wonder why the middle class is hollowed out.
Can we PLEASE index it to inflation going forward regardless of what number we pick?? The fact that Congress has to vote every single time is insane. Of COURSE politicians who get donations from industries that benefit from cheap labor are gonna block it. Just tie it to CPI and be done with it.
I'm a small business owner and I actually SUPPORT a higher minimum wage. You know who spends every single dollar of a raise immediately back into the local economy? Low-wage workers. Rich people save it or invest it offshore. Higher wages = more customers for me. Simple.
Economics 101 also taught you perfectly competitive markets, and the labor market is not one. Monopsony power — where employers have disproportionate bargaining power over workers — means the equilibrium wage is already suppressed below what it would be in a truly competitive market. Your textbook model doesn't actually apply cleanly here, and most labor economists know this.
I have a PhD in labor economics. The literature on this is genuinely more mixed than either side admits. Card and Krueger, the Seattle studies, the Congressional Budget Office analyses — they collectively show modest employment effects, meaningful poverty reduction, and real variation depending on local conditions. Anyone telling you the answer is obvious and simple is either misinformed or selling something.
To the person above me — actually about 1.1 million workers earn at or below the federal minimum wage according to BLS data. You're right that market wages have risen in many places, but those workers exist and they're concentrated in tipped occupations, agricultural work, and certain service sectors. Dismissing them because the number 'isn't that big' feels cold.
I'm a conservative and I actually think the minimum wage should go up — just not to $20 all at once. Phase it in over 6-7 years, tie it to regional CPI, give small businesses tax credits during the transition. There's a deal to be had here if Congress wasn't so broken. The pure culture war framing on both sides prevents actual policy.
The nonprofit concern is legitimate but let's not let it become an argument for keeping everyone poor so that nonprofits can afford staff to serve poor people. That's a structural dysfunction worth solving separately — through better nonprofit funding — not by suppressing wages.
Australia's minimum wage is the equivalent of roughly $15-16 USD and their small business sector hasn't collapsed. Just putting that out there.
That franchise point is actually really important and I never see it in these discussions. The franchise model specifically squeezes location owners from both sides — corporate controls costs AND revenue levers. If you're a franchise owner, you're almost as economically trapped as your employees.
Twenty bucks an hour sounds great until your hours get cut from 38 to 24 so the employer avoids benefits thresholds AND saves on the new wage bill simultaneously. Ask me how I know. Actually don't, it still makes me furious.
I keep seeing people frame this as workers vs small business owners like those are two separate groups. I'm both. I run a small cleaning business and I pay my three employees $18 already because it's the right thing to do and they do better work. The race-to-the-bottom employers are my competition and their low wages are my disadvantage. A floor helps me.
Hard no. I own a diner. 11 employees. Our margins are razor thin, like 4-6% on a good month. You want to nearly triple my labor costs overnight? I'd have to close. Not because I'm greedy — I WANT to pay my people more — but math doesn't care about your feelings.
States ALREADY have the right to go higher. California is at $16, Washington is close to $17. The federal floor matters most for states that have refused to raise theirs — which is exactly where workers need the protection most.
Lost my job at a print shop when they raised our state minimum to $13. Owner said he couldn't make it work. Eighteen months later the shop is still open and the guy he replaced me with makes $14. So. Make of that what you will.
Twenty dollars. Federal. Nationwide. Full stop. I don't want to hear about regional cost of living because my rent in Phoenix went up 60% in four years and nobody asked what region I lived in before jacking it up.
I manage a franchise location in suburban Ohio. 23 employees. Corporate sets our menu prices, I can't just raise prices to cover labor because I'm locked into a franchise agreement pricing structure. People always say 'just raise prices' like that's available to every business. It's not.
Twenty dollars an hour to flip burgers is a slap in the face to people who went to school for years to become nurses, teachers, mechanics. My sister is an EMT and makes $19.50 an hour saving lives. Figure that one out.
The $30/$50 slippery slope argument has been a logical fallacy since the 1960s. We're not debating $50. We're debating $20. The fact that there's some theoretical number too high doesn't tell us anything about whether $20 specifically is right or wrong.
I actually used to oppose minimum wage increases. Changed my mind when I did the math on aggregate demand — low-wage workers spend virtually every dollar they earn, locally, immediately. Higher wages at the bottom of the income scale circulate through the economy faster than equivalent money sitting in retained corporate earnings. Henry Ford understood this. It's not radical economics, it's pretty basic.
The problem with setting it at $20 federally is the same problem with setting it at $7.25 federally: one number cannot possibly reflect the economic reality of both Manhattan and rural Montana. This isn't a defense of $7.25 — that's indefensible. It's an argument for a smarter structural solution, like indexed floors with regional adjustment bands, which several economists across the political spectrum have actually proposed.
The federal minimum wage applying equally to New York City and a small town in Arkansas is fundamentally absurd policy design. A federal floor with state/local ability to go higher makes sense. A one-size mandate for the most economically diverse country on earth does not.
Serious question for the $20 supporters: what happens to the nonprofit sector? Hospitals, community organizations, social services. We're already underfunded by government and private donations. A $20 floor could genuinely force cuts to the actual services low-income communities depend on. That's a real tradeoff that deserves honest discussion.
The real conversation we should be having is about worker power broadly — unionization rates, non-compete clauses, gig worker classification, healthcare tied to employment. Minimum wage is one lever but it's not THE lever. We've let the labor-capital balance tip so far toward capital over 40 years that no single policy fix is going to restore it.
The diner owner above makes a fair point but I'd push back a little. McDonald's and Walmart have lobbied AGAINST minimum wage increases for years while paying their CEOs hundreds of millions. The small business argument gets weaponized constantly to protect corporations who could absolutely afford it.
Hard pass. You raise the federal minimum to $20 and my town in rural Mississippi loses half its small businesses within 18 months. Then what? People have zero jobs at $20 instead of real jobs at $10. A wage floor that wipes out employment isn't compassion, it's math.
Indexing it to inflation going forward is the part of this conversation that gets the least attention and deserves the most. Whatever number we land on — $15, $17, $20 — the fact that it can just sit there while the cost of living moves is the structural failure. Fix the mechanism, not just the number.
Here's something I genuinely don't understand. Conservatives say government shouldn't tell businesses what to pay. Fine, philosophical point. But those same conservatives support tariffs, zoning laws, occupational licensing — all of which interfere with free markets enormously. So the principle isn't really the principle, is it.
The EMT point is actually the strongest argument FOR raising wages broadly — the problem isn't that burger flippers would make too much, it's that EMTs and teachers make criminally little. Those professions need raises too. Lifting the floor helps everyone negotiate upward.
I really wish people would separate two questions: (1) should the minimum wage be raised from $7.25 and (2) should it specifically be $20. I'd bet a huge majority of Americans agree on yes to the first. The second is where it gets complicated. Conflating them makes both debates worse.
I'll say the thing nobody wants to hear: automation is coming for these jobs regardless of what the minimum wage is. If labor costs go up faster, it accelerates. If they don't, corporations will still automate eventually for efficiency. Maybe the real question is what we do for workers in that transition, because fighting over $20/hr is rearranging deck chairs.
i dont have a strong opinion on the exact number but i will say this: the fact that we are having this debate in a country where CEOs routinely make 300-400x their median worker salary tells you everything you need to know about who has power in this conversation
What people don't realize is that raising the minimum wage also puts upward pressure on wages ABOVE the minimum. When the floor goes up, employers have to compete harder for workers at every level. That's not a bug, it's a feature.
With respect to South Dakota — your state legislature has repeatedly refused to raise the state minimum wage on its own. Federal action exists specifically because states with low political will to act leave workers behind. If SD wants to handle it differently, they can lobby for regional carve-outs, but arguing against federal action because your state won't act locally is circular.
BLS data shows roughly 50% of minimum wage workers are over 25. About a third are the sole earner in their household. These aren't overwhelming majorities but they're substantial enough that the 'it's just teenagers at Dairy Queen' framing is clearly wrong.
we keep having this debate every few years and then nothing happens and $7.25 just sits there like a bad smell. at this point im less interested in debating the right number and more interested in why Congress cannot pass literally anything on this issue. that's the actual scandal.
Raised to $20? Sure eventually. But let's be real — Congress hasn't passed a minimum wage increase in 15 years. FIFTEEN. At this point I'd take $12 if it meant it actually passed and got indexed going forward. Perfect is the enemy of good and Washington keeps proving it.
Hot take and I'm ready for the replies: $20 federal minimum with a five-year phase-in, indexed to CPI thereafter, with a small-business carve-out for firms under 10 employees for years one through three. This is a reasonable compromise that would probably get 60% support in a poll and approximately zero support in Congress. Which tells you a lot about Congress.
Australia also has a completely different healthcare system so employers there aren't also paying health insurance premiums on top of wages. You can't just swap numbers across countries without accounting for total compensation costs.
The automation boogeyman gets trotted out every single time. They said ATMs would eliminate bank tellers. Teller jobs increased for years because banks opened more branches. Technology creates displacement AND new jobs. It's never as simple as 'robots take everything.'
Okay but 7% price increase over two years at a bakery in BURLINGTON VERMONT is not the same as a 7% price increase at the only diner in a town of 800 people in rural Georgia. The customer base is completely different. The median income of your customers is completely different. I'm not saying don't raise wages. I'm saying the bakery-in-Vermont example does not generalize the way people want it to.
okay so here's a question nobody seems to want to answer directly: if $20 is good, why not $30? why not $50? at some point there's a number that's clearly too high. so the debate isn't really whether there's a limit, it's where to draw it. which means this is an empirical question not a moral one.
Confidently agree with everything about tipped wages. We should go to a European-style service included model. Tipping culture is humiliating for workers and lets restaurants pay poverty wages while customers subsidize it.
raise it. index it. enforce it. move on. this is not complicated, we just lack the political will because the people hurt by low wages are not major campaign donors. end of analysis.
I live in rural South Dakota. $20/hr would absolutely devastate our local economy. A cashier at our only grocery store making $20 is not the same situation as a cashier in Chicago. I'm not against helping workers but this specific policy would kill jobs in my town, full stop.
this debate is honestly exhausting. both sides have been yelling the same things at each other for 15 years while workers keep falling further behind. just do something already
nah we keep compromising down and then the compromise becomes the new ceiling that never moves. incremental thinking is how we got stuck at $7.25 for a decade and a half. set the target high.
I'm a libertarian and even I think $7.25 is a joke at this point. That said, I'd rather see this solved through stronger labor organizing rights than a federal mandate. Give workers real bargaining power and wages will reflect actual market value without a price floor. The minimum wage is in some ways a band-aid over the wound that is the evisceration of American union density since the 1980s.
Economics 101 literally teaches you that price floors above equilibrium cause surpluses — in the labor market that means unemployment. Raising minimum wage to $20 in low-wage areas creates a surplus of labor (unemployed workers). This is just basic supply and demand, not ideology.
Actually this is a myth. Studies from Seattle's $15 minimum wage showed that many middle-tier workers saw their raises essentially eaten up because the wage compression forced companies to flatten their pay scales. Some workers ended up making almost the same as new hires after years of service. So it's not automatically good for everyone.
Inflation adjustment comparisons are tricky because the economy in 1968 was completely different — union density was near 30%, benefits packages were more common, housing costs were a smaller share of income. You can't just CPI-adjust one variable and call it equivalent.
The Earned Income Tax Credit is specifically designed to supplement low wages without distorting the labor market. It's not perfect but it does more targeted good for working families than a blunt minimum wage increase. Conservatives have supported it for decades. Why can't we expand that instead?
grew up in appalachia. nobody where im from is making $7.25 either — most make $10-12 because the market pushed it there naturally. so the real question is who exactly is still earning federal minimum and in what industries. the debate is always framed like millions of people are living on $7.25 today and thats... not really accurate?
Genuinely asking: has any country gone from near-zero minimum wage to $20 equivalent overnight? Because I feel like we're having this debate in a vacuum without looking at what actually happened elsewhere.
What percentage of minimum wage earners are actually primary household breadwinners vs second incomes? I've seen wildly different numbers cited in these debates. Does anyone have a reliable source? Genuinely not trying to dismiss anyone, I just want to argue from actual data.
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