In 2025, the federal minimum wage is officially a “poverty wage.” The annual earnings of a single adult working full-time, year-round at $7.25 an hour now fall below the poverty threshold of $15,650 (established by the Department of Health and Human Services guidelines). The limitations of how the federal government calculates poverty understate how far…
  • ignirtoq@fedia.io
    6·
    6 hours ago

    And that’s with a poverty line that’s already way too low. The poverty line is based on the price of food, because when it was instituted that’s what poor people spent something like 2/3 of their income on. Now the poor spend about 10-25% of their income on food and at least 2/3 on housing, but the official poverty line is still based on food prices.