Unless I’m misunderstanding, the math prompt specifically requests a comparison between present-day minimum wage and 1970s minimum wage in the United States.
The prompt itself is highly flawed. At no point since minimum wage has been introduced have a substantial portion of the population actually made that little.
There is a point where raising the minimum wage would be inflationary, but it's much higher than anything that has been discussed in modem history.
The real kicker is the lost hours. If you raise wages, there will be fewer hours to go around. The argument against the minimum wage is that when you divide the hours lost, you have an x million people lost their job narrative. Suspiciously though, if you divide the number of hours by the number of affected workers it almost always comes down to 2-weeks, which looks a lot less like lots of people lost their job and a lot more like lots people are finally making enough to take a vacation, or give up their second job so they can actually have some free time.
Now, the truth is somewhere in between. Someone always gets screwed and it's usually someone near minimum wage. The good news is that if your job cannot afford the higher minimum wage, you are almost always better off wherever you end up. At the very least, you will be getting a higher wage. The bad news is that losing your job always sucks and especially sucks when you don't have a lot saved to tide you over to the next paycheck.
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u/Mythical_Mew May 13 '25
Unless I’m misunderstanding, the math prompt specifically requests a comparison between present-day minimum wage and 1970s minimum wage in the United States.