The Boomer Wage Ponzi
"I worked a minimum-wage job and could pay rent, buy groceries, and save."
The US is the exception on every line. Groceries rose against the floor, not fell. The federal minimum wage has been frozen at USD 7.25 since July 2009. Sixteen consecutive years. Every state and city that has a higher floor has it because Congress refused to move the federal one.
A 1968 minimum-wage hour bought 2.6 hours of weekly groceries; today it buys 4.8. The federal wage went from USD 1.25 in 1964 to USD 7.25, a multiple of 5.8x. In the same window the median US house went up 22x. Wages did not keep up with food. They did not keep up with anything else either.
A federal floor frozen for sixteen years, a housing ladder pulled up. Time to bust the fourth pillar of the Boomer Truth Regime.
Choose your boomer
What the floor was
$1.25 To $7.25. Then Flat Since 2009.
The nominal hourly federal floor by year. Day-weighted annual averages where statutory increases hit mid-year. Frozen at USD 7.25 from July 24, 2009 onward. Sixteen years and counting. The longest pause in the history of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
What rent cost the floor
Hours Per Month Of Rent.
Federal-minimum-wage hours required to cover one month of Census median gross rent. A full-time month is 173 hours. When the bar crosses 173, a single full-time federal-minimum-wage job no longer covers shelter alone.
What a tank cost
Fuel By The Hour.
Minutes of federal-minimum-wage work for one gallon of regular gasoline. The 2009 wage freeze runs straight through the 2022 fuel spike. A frozen floor against a moving price gives a clean visual indictment.
Where the myth fails hardest
Even Food Got More Expensive.
The receipt
Wages Grew. Houses Grew More.
Nominal multiplier on the federal minimum wage from cohort start to today, against the same multiplier on the median US house price. Two bars. To scale. The cohort's untaxed capital gain lives in the gap.
Method and sources
Where These Numbers Come From.
The methodology for the country currently selected. Click another boomer above to switch sources.
Wage / fuel / grocery / rent series live in public/data/{cc}/{cc}_wages.json. House-price series are reused from the housing dataset at public/data/{cc}/{cc}_housing.json. Builder code lives in src/wages/. State and city minimum wages diverge materially from the federal floor; this page uses the federal floor for cleanest cross-country comparison.
References
Sources.
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