A pair of progressive Democrats unveiled a bill on Tuesday that would raise the federal minimum wage to $25 per hour, considered the bare minimum a single adult needs to meet the cost of living in much of the US.
The Living Wage For All Act is the first bill to be introduced by the newly sworn-in Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ), who won a special election earlier this month after helping to lead the fight for a $15 minimum wage in her home state of New Jersey.
As someone that makes around $25, that’s still not even that much money. It definitely feels like a good minimum wage as I can afford my bills and food relatively easily (although it is getting harder as prices go up) but it’s still not really enough to make my life that much more comfortable than it was 5 years ago.
The only complaint I have is that I needed to work for 10 years in order to reach a wage of what would now be considered minimum wage. It’s always seemed like every increase in wages I have ever gotten has been a year or two too late conpared to how expensive everything is. When I was making $14 an hour the average house prices in my area were $100,000 to $300,000. Now that I’m making almost twice as much and could afford a house 8 years ago, house prices in my area average around $400,000 to $800,000 and sometimes over $1,000,000. It’s like I’ve been playing catch up since the day I was born. In my opinion, I should be making $30+ an hour.
$25 an hour treated me extremely well in the southeast with my partner making about the same or at least pre-inflation. Even then that just meant keeping a slightly tighter budget, but still a pretty comfortable life.
So, in other words, it took 80 hours a week to live comfortably at that wage…
I mean we probably could have been okay with less. We did take a trip to Europe lol
But also at the same time kids still felt out of reach. 2 weeks in Europe was about 5k, but even 1 kid would be way more than that. World’s off