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Debate & Discuss / Re: minimum wage increase
« on: March 21, 2016, 11:16:39 am »Message ID: 1054453so, if the minimum wage goes up, so will cost of living will increase.
The cost of living has already been increasing steadily for the past thirty or forty years. It's the minimum wage that has failed to keep up.
Minimum wage has kept up. If it was adjusted for inflation, it would only be $4-5 today.
How has it kept up? It has stayed about the same (in most of the US) since the 1970s. Why would adjusting it for inflation make it even less?
Your first statement is blatantly false. Minimum wage was only $1.60 in 1970. It's more than quadrupled since then. Second, when minimum wage was signed into law in 1938, it was $0.25/hr. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $4.20 in 2016.QuoteWhile the federal minimum wage was only $3.35 per hour in 1981 and is currently $7.25 per hour in real dollars, when adjusted for inflation, the current federal minimum wage would need to be more than $8 per hour to equal its buying power of the early 1980s and more nearly $11 per hour to equal its buying power of the late 1960s.http://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster
Exactly. $3.35 in 1981 to $7.25 today. That's more than double, not about the same.
It does not have the same spending power.
But you said it was about the same.
Yes, same spending power, making it effectively the same.