We can already see a cornerstone of what Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s pitch is going to be as she attempts to become the next president. The barker’s stall is festooned with the message that the minimum wage used to support a family, but now it doesn’t, so let’s do something about that. More specifically, she is repeatedly saying that “When I was a kid, a minimum wage job in America would support a family of three. It would pay a mortgage, keep the utilities on and put food on the table.”

Clearly this is indelicate, perhaps even impolite, but Warren, D-Mass., was born in 1949 and a useful definition to me of “kid” is 10 years old or under. The minimum wage did not keep a family of three out of poverty in 1959, that sadly being the first year that we’ve got official estimates for what the U.S. poverty line was. If we want to use a more expansive definition of kid that might take us up to 1967, and that minimum wage would only have kept that family of three above that poverty line in three years, 1963, 1964 and 1967. It would be unkind to take that definition of kid-dom any later than that, as 1968 saw Warren married, something which to me at least indicates the idea of an adult.