25 Reactions To Biden’s Promise To Raise The Minimum Wage To $15/h

Meme on how Americans react to the minimum wage being raised vs. billionaires making more money

Photo via @RickyRawls/Twitter

January 18, 2021, 2:06 pm

Joe Biden had a little surprise for us in his promised COVID-19 relief package, adding in a federal $15 minimum wage that worker’s rights groups have been demanding for years now. This, of course, re-launched the old debate on the subject, with conservatives dusting off their old claims that a higher minimum wage hurts the economy (it doesn’t) and that those worker we were all calling “essential” don’t deserve more money (they do).

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Anybody who has actually worked a minimum wage job as a “burger flipper” or any one of the countless other low-paid positions is now expressing their exhaustion at these old and debunked arguments. In places that already have a $15 wage in place, such as Seattle, people are pointing out how prices have not raised substantially and every other business has not gone bankrupt.

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The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour and has been since 2009 in spite of inflation and skyrocketing costs of living in the U.S. Real economists have estimated that if the minimum wage had kept up with worker productivity, it would have been $19.33 in 2017, and that raising it to $15 per hour now would like one million Americans out of poverty.

People’s reactions to this old debate coming around again have been hilarious, gut-punching, and both. Here are 25 of our favorites:

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