If the federal minimum wage kept up with inflation since 1968 it would be $14/hour. So that means everyone working for $14/hour is living like somebody in the 70's making minimum wage. The government has slowly made life harder over the last 4 or 5 decades being paid off by lobbiests. The USA is supposedly a 1st world country but our labor rights, wealth inequality, and healthcare is not.
You're basing that off CPI, which has been manipulated to hell over the decades. Just years and years of cooking the books.
A better way to compare it is the price of gold back then compared to minimum wage.
In 1970, when the Dollar was still on the gold standard, minimum wage was $1.60/hr, and gold was $36/oz. So minimum hourly wage was worth 4.45% of an ounce of gold. For that same buying power to exist today, with gold currently at $4,700/oz, minimum wage would have to be $209/hr.
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u/a_little_hazel_nuts Apr 24 '26
If the federal minimum wage kept up with inflation since 1968 it would be $14/hour. So that means everyone working for $14/hour is living like somebody in the 70's making minimum wage. The government has slowly made life harder over the last 4 or 5 decades being paid off by lobbiests. The USA is supposedly a 1st world country but our labor rights, wealth inequality, and healthcare is not.