Work Reform

So by this analysis, the state with the lowest cost of living is still at least $39/hr?

TL;DR: skip to the graphs at the end for the meat and potatoes

SmartAsset’s calculations for cost of living in 2025 are based on a healthy financial breakdown of 50/30/20 for expenses, discretionary, and savings/debt payment percentages. Which is a level of fiscal security everyone should be entitled to IMO

Their cost of living calculations are not based on “what is the bare minimum one can survive on” where your percentages look more like 66/33/0 or 90/10/0

Really the larger thing these maps show is how all of the money has been drained away from working people over the past 70+ years. The cost of everything has accelerated, for example $35 an hour is about the amount one must make to afford the median rent or median mortgage prices in 2025, but we get screwed out of the value that our labor creates as it gets siphoned upwards. Most Americans survive on credit, which they wouldnt have to do if wages had kept up with inflation the same way that rent did since an era before neoliberal economic policy wrecked everything. If they had, then people would be making about $35 an hour. Considering we produce such massive value with our labor, it makes perfect sense. But allowing wages to stagnate is obviously beneficial to those with concentrated wealth, be it companies or individuals

If in 1958, a salary of $6,514 a year could cover the cost for a family of four then that should show you how ridiculously expensive everything has become. Modern families have two income earners and still cannot afford comfortable cost of living, which is over double what it costs for a single individual. If both of those income earners were paid at minimum $35 an hour, then families would actually be much closer to affording COL for a family of four. But they would still need additional income to reach the level of 50/30/20 comfort.

People struggle to understand just how far off the modern American worker is from the financial security that was had by the average male worker or median household in 1958. If we were to draw a direct comparison to that situation and say everyone should get paid enough to support a family of four individually, like you could back then, then everybody would have to be making like $80 an hour due to the massive inflation in costs that wages have not remotely kept up with.

Households in the 1950s had practically zero debt, in comparison to modern households which are absolutely drowning in it. Americans right now hold, collectively, over 1 trillion dollars in just credit card debt. On average each American holds over $6k in credit card debt, which would be over 10% of the average salary earner’s income ($61k). Again, just on credit card debt and nothing else. In 1950, all debt owned by the average household equated to only 2% of their income. Two percent. And people were way worse off financially in 1950 than they were by 1958

Even if the federal minimum wage were $35 per hour, on average people working for that wage would still be unable to afford to live comfortably at 50/30/20 without working a second job. Meanwhile, real actual minimum wages in nearly 10 states are still at $7.25 an hour. Let that sink in for a second. There are people close to getting paid literally 5 times less than what it costs to live anywhere near a base level of comfort. That doesnt even go into agriculture, where the federal minimum wage is even lower

Our economy is massively fucked. Were long past a crossroads point where, in order to reach a point of sustainability, we either have to pay people more or have legitimate social services like universal healthcare and childcare. Continuing down the same path is doomed to fail just based on simple logic. All of the people’s money has disappeared into the pockets of the 1%, who provide nothing with their hoarding. They create something of value by spending, but their hoarding massively outweighs their spending and will only continue to do so without intervention

47% of households, not individuals, are below the amount of income for one individual to live comfortably.

In 1958, about that same percentage of households were below an inflationary equivalent income, but the difference was that at $5k-$6k a year they were affording COL for their entire household. Being below the median of income was not such a crushing situation as it is today.

Only 1 in 44 American households made over the equivalent of $170k today, in the ultra wealthy category. Thats 2% of them. Probably 20% of households today make an excess of $170k, with a handful of them hoarding an insane amount well beyond what a household that makes $170k a year could ever feasibly hope to earn.

$170k is still $7k shy of comfortable cost of living for a family of four in Mississippi, and about half of what it costs in Hawai’i, Cali, Mass…

Therefore, most people making the equivalent of a top tier bracket income in 1958 would not be able to afford the average cost of living at basic financial security in 2025. You would have to practically have been a 1%er back then just to be comfortable today

Even the richest guy in 1958, J Paul Getty, was worth only $1B. The equivalent of a “meager” $12B or so today. Elon Musk has $433B and hes not even lonely up there.

If we capped net wealth at $12B and took away everything else above that point, there would still be 812 more billionaires than in 1958, and the US would immediately have $5T to begin rectifying the massive dysfunction in our economy

How are you accounting for cities pulling up the averages for each state? For example New York has some dirt cheap places to live, but it's clearly being dragged up by New York City.

I'm pretty sure the cost of living numbers are for a household, not an individual.

So unless we're looking to get back to single income households, the min wage should be divided by two.

At first glance that top map already looked bad, but then I zoomed in on the legend and the cutoff for the white areas is an annual deficit of 60.000 ... What a ridiculous scale, that entire map should be blood red.

I would like to see a graph of the percentage of people earning minimum wage in every state. It seems like minimum wage is no longer a thing.