lately weve seen a decrease in workers and jobs constantly putting up a concerning amount of application signs. why could this be? could it be terrible working conditions, extremely high expirience/education expectations from employers, lack of hiring from employers for the most part or even rising inflation making minimum wage unable to aquire basic needs with? of course not! its the gen z and millenials fault! they just dont want to work despite putting in applications at every single store near them!

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just kidding. people who disagree most likely dont see that inflation plays a big role into this. but if we look at minimum wage it has stayed the same. right now federal minimum wage is $7.25[1]. in 1980 the federal minimum wage was $2.10[2] an hour. if we do the math, online calculators agree that its around $7.76 today. why has the federal minimum wage decreased?

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if we look at the prices of houses in 1980 vs 2022 the price has gone up 613% (heres this to say i updated the shitty math from before). yet the federal minimum wage has decreased a small bit.. shouldnt the federal wage be increasing if housing prices and everything else is increasing too? the median for houses in 1980 was $47,220; account for inflation and that is $167,708 today[3]. but in 2020 the median house price is $336,900. maybe this is why boomers expectations of how much 7 dollars an hour can buy is exponentially high. but maybe houses are an unfair thing to compare to. lets look at apartment prices in 1980 vs 2022. apartment prices have gone from $698 in 1980 to $1,154.62 in 2014 and recently in 2022 rent costs have gone up to $2,495 a month[4]

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upon learning the truth people may say "but minimum wage is for teenagers!!! its obviouslty not for adults" the truth is many adults live from pay check to paycheck and it doesnt matter who you think the job is for, they are still going to do what they need to to keep living. the people who think minimum wage isnt supposed to be able to support even one person fail to realize the original purpose of minimum wage was to clearly only be above "bare subsistence". it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who invented minimum wage and said that "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country" and "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."[5]

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they have this mentality of work hard enough and you will get what you want but that is not always true. sadly you cant just go to college and get an education, not everyones as privileged and can afford to pay for college or afford to study instead of working. its just unfair. we also need these people who work at minimum wage jobs because its good for the economy and without them you wouldnt be able to get your daily dunkin donuts coffee. the world is figuratively burning in flames and were all here like:

an increase in minimum wage could bring an increase in spending which is good for the economy.[6]

source time

dol.gov[1]
census.gov
Montana department of labour and industry[2]
huduser.gov page 56[3]. bare in mind, for this i had to do some calculations beacuse eveything was converted to 1990 dollars.
inflation calculator
creditkarmma, cnbc, apartmentlist.com[4] i calculated how much 2014s price would be in 2022 and im sure the price has risen since this article was published.
[5]
[6]