Opinion: I don't care if we fight for $10/hour or $15/hour, we just need a minimum wage increase

If you look at the world today, you see more millennials living with their parents and taking minimum wage jobs, seemingly stuck in their positions. These people, for a while now, have been demanding a minimum wage increase to $15/hour.

Are they being reasonable?

Let's take a look at the numbers. The minimum wage in 1975 was $2.10/hour. That may not seem like a lot in today's money, because it's not. The value of the dollar has gone down since 1975 in a process called inflation.

In order to address this, they increased the minimum wage almost every year, to adjust for inflation.

The last increase happened in 2009. Let's talk about that.

The numbers I give you will be pulled from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If we adjusted the value of $2.10 in 1975 to 2009's money, you would find the value was actually $8.51, rather than the $7.25 it was increased to. This would mean the value of the worker seems to have gone down over time, not up, as the standard of living was going up as well.

Now, let's compare the 2007 wage of $5.85. According to this inflation calculator, the value of that was $6.10. If properly chained to inflation, the wage would have been $8.16.

So, let's take a look at these three wages. In 1975, it was $2.10/hour. In 2007, it was $5.85/hour. In 2009, it became $7.25/hour.

Adjusting for inflation to today, the wage if chained since 1975 would be $9.99/hour, or simply one penny less than $10/hour. If chained since 2007, it would be $7.16/hour. If chained since 2009, it would be $8.51/hour.

If you consider that the reason we had the increase in 2009, was because people at minimum wage couldn't afford anything... you get to the realization that we're pretty close to that value. It gets even more complicated with the fact that the standard of living has gone up.

So, is $15/hour a reasonable demand? Maybe. Me, personally, I'd be happy with an increase to just $10/hour, as well as being chained to inflation, simply so that the value of the dollar we're earning is the same as our grandparents earned in 1975. There's no reason why a burger-flipper has had it's value lowered to 72.5% over time.

Will prices go up? Sure. But you all have to remember, the prices have already gone up, and keeps going up without us addressing this issue. The price increase we'd experience would not offset the benefits of the minimum wage increase. It would simply lead to people who already could afford their luxuries having to spend a little more money.

How do we know this increase wouldn't lead to major problems? Our minimum wage was chained to inflation from 1938-2009, for 71 years, with no problem. It even adjusted for the standard of living from time to time.

Any major problems that would arise would stem from our negligence to this issue, NOT by the increase itself.

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