The Fight For 25

The cheapest Big Mac Meal in the country costs $7.79, in Kentucky.^[1] The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Even in the lowest-cost state, one hour of labor at the legal floor doesn't cover a fast food combo. The national average Big Mac Meal runs $9.29. One hour of work at the federal minimum, before taxes, can't cover one meal.

That $7.25 was set on July 24, 2009. It has not changed since. Sixteen years without an increase is the longest stretch in the minimum wage's history, longer than the ten-year freeze at $5.15 from 1997 to 2007, longer than the nine-year freeze at $3.35 through the 1980s.^[2] When Congress created the minimum wage through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the purpose was a floor below which no worker's standard of living could fall. In inflation-adjusted terms, today's $7.25 buys what $4.91 bought in 2009. The federal minimum is now worth less than at any point since 1956.^[3]

On November 29, 2012, roughly two hundred fast-food workers walked off the job at thirty restaurants across New York City. They demanded $15 an hour and the right to organize.^[4] The movement they launched, Fight for $15, reshaped the wage debate. By its tenth anniversary, twenty-nine states and nearly sixty cities had raised their wage floors, affecting twenty-six million workers and $150 billion in cumulative pay.^[5] The Fight for $15 accomplished something real, but the economy moved faster than the policy. Inflation has eaten roughly a third of $15's purchasing power since 2012. The target was right then. It isn't now.

A worker earning $15 an hour grosses $31,200 a year. HUD says housing should cost no more than 30% of gross income. That gives you $780 a month. The national average one-bedroom apartment costs $1,390, and a minimum-wage worker would need 97 hours a week to afford it.^[6] Nearly half of all renter households already pay more than the 30% threshold. Fourteen of the twenty most common occupations in America, covering sixty-four million workers, pay less than the hourly wage needed to afford a one-bedroom. The gap between what people earn and what a basic life costs is the lived reality of a wage floor that stopped functioning years ago.

Where did the gains go? In 1965, CEOs at the largest American firms earned 21 times what their typical workers made. By 2023, that ratio was 290 to 1. Over forty-five years, CEO compensation grew 1,085% while typical worker pay grew 24%.^[7] After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 slashed the corporate rate from 35% to 21%, supporters promised the savings would reach workers. In 2018, S&P 500 companies spent a record $806 billion buying back their own stock, a 55% surge from the prior year.^[8] An IMF working paper tracked where the new cash actually went. Only about 20% reached capital expenditure or research and development.^[9] Walmart generates billions in annual profit while its workforce costs American taxpayers $6.2 billion a year in public assistance. Noblesse Oblige, A Primer follows that money in detail. The wealth workers created is sitting in stock portfolios and executive compensation packages, exactly where the incentive structure directed it.

If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity growth since its 1968 peak, it would be roughly $24 to $25 an hour today. The Economic Policy Institute and National Employment Law Project calculated $24.14 for 2023.^[10] The MIT Living Wage Calculator, updated February 2025, confirms it from the cost side: a single adult with no children needs $19.43 an hour in West Virginia, the cheapest state, and $29.92 in Hawaii.^[11] In Florida, $23.41. That calculation covers food, housing, transportation, medical costs, and taxes. It leaves out savings. It leaves out entertainment. It leaves out everything you might want from life beyond survival.

The 1938 minimum wage of twenty-five cents was designed so a worker could live on it. $25 in 2025 restores what that number was meant to guarantee, adjusted for what the economy produces and what life actually costs.

So imagine it works. Imagine the floor holds.

You wake up on a Tuesday. Your rent is covered, with room left for food and the electric bill, because the wage floor tracks what things actually cost. You go to work because the work matters to you, because you chose this job over the others you could afford to wait for. Your employer treats you decently, partly because they're decent, partly because you could leave and they know it. Your kid's school gets funded properly because the tax base isn't hollowed out by a workforce earning poverty wages. You have a little saved. Not a fortune. Enough that your car breaking down is a frustration, not a catastrophe. The coffee shop charges slightly more for a latte and everyone can afford it, including the owner. The floor holds, and people build on it.

None of that requires technology that doesn't exist. None of it violates economic law. Guaranteed-income pilots consistently find the same thing: give people a stable floor and they don't stop working. They stabilize. They participate. They build. Stockton, California ran one of the most rigorous U.S. tests, and after two years of $500 monthly payments, recipients doubled their emergency savings and showed measurable improvement in mental health.^[12] GiveDirectly's large-scale trial in Kenya found every dollar transferred generated $2.50 in local economic activity.^[13]

Congress isn't going to deliver it. Since 2009, at least five major efforts to raise the federal minimum wage have failed. The Raise the Wage Act passed the House in 2019, the first full floor vote since 2007, and the Senate never voted on it.^[14] In 2021, a standalone amendment failed 42 to 58, with eight Democrats joining every Republican.^[15]

The industries that profit from cheap labor spend heavily to keep it cheap. Twenty trade groups opposing a wage increase spent over $91 million on lobbying in a single year and sent more than $5.5 million to Congressional campaigns, 83% to Republicans.^[16] The National Restaurant Association spent $3.49 million lobbying in 2024 and has lobbied successfully since 1996 to keep the tipped minimum wage frozen at $2.13, where it's been since 1991.

Their favorite argument is automation. Raise wages, they say, and the robots replace you. The United States deployed McDonald's self-order kiosks at $7.25 an hour. Denmark deployed the same kiosks on the same timeline while paying workers $20 to $22 through collective bargaining.^[17] Raising the minimum wage doesn't kill jobs. The largest meta-analysis of the research, covering 88 studies over three decades, found the employment effect for the broad low-wage workforce was effectively zero.^[18] California raised its fast-food minimum to $20 in April 2024. Initial research found wages rose, prices increased 1.5 to 3.7 percent, and employment held.^[19] Automation follows technology costs, not wages. The lobby knows it. The argument is a tool, not an analysis.

The industries that profit from a broken wage floor have every incentive to keep it broken and the resources to make sure Congress obliges. Sixteen years of proof is enough.

When a floor depends on a vote, the people who profit from no floor can block the vote. That's the lesson of the last sixteen years, and it's the reason PSI doesn't build its floor that way. MUNNY is a cryptocurrency distributed daily to every verified member of the platform. The distribution is written into the system's architecture, not subject to annual appropriation or a filibuster. The rules are transparent. The social contract is one you actually sign. The floor holds because the code says it holds, not because a legislature that's failed five times in a row decides to try a sixth. The evidence and the reasoning are in The Case For Universal Basic Income.

The minimum wage was created so that work meant a decent life. Eighty-seven years later, it doesn't. Congress and the lobbying interests that fund it have spent sixteen years proving they won't fix it. We're building the floor they won't.