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To End ‘New Gilded Age,’ House Progressives Unveil Bill to Raise Federal Minimum Wage to $25 Per Hour
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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politics
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Why does this has to be regulated on federal level and not by the states?
My state has the minimum wage set at the federal minimum wage (7.25/hr) which is not livable in any area of the state.
They even passed laws so our mostly Democratic-leaning urban city can't raise the minimum wage past the state minimum wage. The cost of living in that city is higher than my local area, where you can't find a 1br apartment for less than $900/month
The federal wage has to be raised federally or red states will never do it.
"has to be"? why do you have to ask this question?
I have to ask this because different states of US have different economic circumstances and different costs of living.
Federal minimum wage is $7.50 that is not a livable wage anywhere in the country. Currently about half the states have minimum wage at or below federal level, (where the state is below federal is the minimum actually paid) without a federal level most of those states would have a lower minimum wage. Anytime a job pays minimum wage you should assume they would pay less if they could.
So to answer your question, many states would happily let companies fuck their citizens, the fed is there to apply a tiny bit of spit to makes things more comfortable.
I’d counter that without addressing price gouging, rent control/passive income, and pain in the ass scores are, raising minimum wage is a short term “win” that will quickly be erased as soon as inflation catches up and leases need renewed. Your bottom end apartment that was willing to rent to you for X amount because they know it’s a shithole now knows you make $25 an hour. If they were taking 2/3 of your income when you made it at $7.25, they’re going to want 2/3 of $25. The apartments that were renting to people making $25 before are going to adjust to limit access to people making even more to keep the riffraff out. And credit providers won’t view this as a step-up for us, they’ll just raise the ceiling for approval. They might have given you a home loan if you were making $25/hr in a $7.25 world, but now everyone makes that, sorry!
It’s the illusion of progress because it only addresses one facet of what needs to be done. I’d rather see a world where $7.25 is a living wage because the exploiters were cut off from their practices than one where we pretend like giving the masses “more” is the solution.
Not going to matter much because the boomers will all shout "when I was your age, I had five kids and a house on less than minimum wage! You just need to sacrifice a little more!" and then it'll just get shut down by people who have never experienced poverty, let alone even middle class life.
My boomer-fuck parents made their way on the world my greatest and silent generation grandparents fought for, and bled & sweat for. Then they turned that into a swindle and called it “self-made”. Then they never let go. Fuck ‘em. You half-assed it and think you’ve earned it. I’ll grant there was an occasional effort, but you never did as hard as they did. An entire generation of stolen valor.
Shouldn't this be resolved on state level? Don't you vote on local politicians every few years? Minimum wage seems like part of local economic policy that should be decided based on local factors. Like cost of living and competitiveness of local economy.
Not with the broken system we have in place now, so many times the citizens vote for something then the politicians just change it, Americans in aggregate are not very good at understanding politics and tend to be easily swayed by anger.
And the fix is to rely on exactly identical broken system except on federal level?
Yes, because 1 broken system is better than 50 broken systems.