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.
Perhaps this is living in hope, but maybe she’ll grow up one day too.
The calculations are simply a 2,000 hour working year (50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week) at the prevailing minimum wage for that year. Clearly we can get slightly different answers using slightly different assumptions – the average work year is rather lower today than it was then.
Maybe this is just me, but I don’t think that the minimum wage supporting a family of three above the poverty line only three years out of nine really quite justifies Warren’s proclamation.
There is, though, this rather more fundamental question. Why should one minimum wage job support a family of three anyway? Certainly the entire thrust of our welfare and anti-poverty system has been based upon a very different assumption since the early 1970s. Effectively, healthy adults can fend for themselves but children deserve rather more protection from the cold winds of market valuations. So, benefits and aid are based upon need – it being children who need those things. Tax credits, food stamps, Section 8 vouchers, Medicaid (the four biggies in the poverty reduction system) are aimed at those raising and caring for children, certainly they pay out much more to them.
Which, if it’s the support of a family that the system is supposed to be enabling, seems sensible enough. We want families to be supported, let’s direct our aid at families, not at those single people who don’t have them or thus the need for the support.
There is one more wrinkle to this. Quite the largest change of this past 50 or 60 years has been the economic emancipation of women. Yet we’ve now got this insistence that the work of just the one person should be enough to support the entire nuclear family. This is understandable perhaps from the religious right, with that stay-at-home-mom model so oft derided in these modern times. But why is Warren demanding that the world work that way? Just how conservative are progressives these days anyway?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
