this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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To be fair, many states and cities have their own minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. I'll let you guess which states don't.
And most people in those states that don't have their own don't work for the federal minimum wage. My state has no minimum wage, and most "minimum wage" jobs start at something like $10-12.
Which is still garbage. How does someone survive today on less than $25,000/year?
Live with their parents. It's doable to "survive", it's just that someone cannot "thrive", i.e. live the American Dream, or have health insurance, thus getting back to your point about survival, although that's generally considered a separate thing than income, bc e.g. someone could be on their spouse's health plan.
And then there are all sorts of tricks to go below minimum wage too... including having more black people locked up and working in for-profit prisons than were ever used as slaves; or Waffle House's trick where someone only gets a base wage of like $3.25 an hour and then while the minimum $7.25 per hour is guaranteed, in order to get more than that they have to make up the difference with tips (on what is <$10 meals).
But how do you help people when (a) things like the electoral college and gerrymandering exist, (b) preachers say from the actual, literal pulpit that God commands to vote Republican, and (c) those areas vote conservative not only for themselves but also apply that to the nation at large, e.g. keeping Mitch McConnell in power, and making abortion illegal in those states.
TLDR: it's how they choose to live. And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those "rights" further.
Well we know how American civil wars end, and the country could use some more Reconstruction