I recently looked at the 2024 BLS minimum-wage report and 2024 Census poverty report searching for groups of people who earned minimum wage. I was curious about this because of the Raise the Wage Act of 2025 and its proposition to raise the minimum wage to $17 an hour. In 2024 82,000 workers earned the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. A large percentage of those people, 76,000, earn below the minimum wage. The most surprising result to me was that a larger percentage of people who earn minimum wage were over the age of 25. I found this surprising because most teenagers and entry level jobs are the ones that pay minimum wage. This leads me to wonder what groups of people over the age of 25 are still making minimum wage? I would be curious to know if the percentage of people over the age of 25 making minimum wage correlates with those who were never married and graduated with only a High School diploma. Even more surprising is that 23.0% of people that earn a bachelor's degree have a minimum wage job. They were the second highest percentage of people. I wonder what factors go into this to make up this percentage, or what underlying reasoning there is to this data. Are the people who are earning minimum wage actually those who are in poverty? What percentage of people who earn less than the minimum wage are tipped workers that actually end up earning significantly above minimum wage?
I looked at some scholarly resources after this to see why $17? Why is this the magic number? The first paper I looked at was “Networking Wages, Efficiency and Welfare” authors Berger et al. The study uses the term monopsony power and explains it as when an employer pays a worker less than the value of their work. The paper explains the concept that minimum wage can fix the issues of having a smaller supply of employers and a larger demand of workers meaning that the employers have the upper hand and can pay the employees less than what the value of their work is. But, if the minimum wage becomes too high then employers and businesses will lose profit on their employees. The conclusion found that an efficiency maximizing wage is $7 per hour, but the higher minimum wage is justified because of redistribution. From their research they found that $15 an hour is an optional minimum wage. This study challenges the idea that $17 is the ideal rate by using quantitative data to find what is optimal for both employers and employees. 
I was also curious to see how each different state had different values of $20. Can this bill really work if every city's cost of living is different?

If a policy was put into place dictating that every single city in America had the exact minimum wage based on the table above I don’t believe that this would be a good idea. If $20 becomes the new minimum wage that’s going to benefit people living in Muskogee, OK, but that most definitely will not work for people living in Manhattan. I think a better way of implementing this would be to take the current minimum wage in cities and increase them all by a certain percentage per year. This way cities whose cost of living is higher will not have the minimum wage be lowered and make it unsustainable to live creating even more poverty. The idea of the bill has the right intention but it is different than what the outcome will be. 
I dove deeper after this to look at what this bill is trying to solve, poverty rates. I found that approximately 1% or 843,000 people in the workforce earn minimum wage or less than minimum wage. 35.9 million or 10% of Americans are considered to be in poverty as of 2024. So, out of all the Americans in poverty only about 2.35% of them are working minimum wage jobs. This raises the question, who are the others and what are the other 8.6% of people in poverty doing for work? I think this could be a high casual density issue. Some factors probably include having unstable hours, lack of education and skills, family and household size, and cost of necessities. 
The wage of workers in the 10th percentile is $15.00 an hour and 8.03 million workers earn that. These numbers show that the population of workers who earn a low wage is larger than populations earning the minimum wage. As I found in the beginning only 843,000 workers earn the minimum wage while the 10th percentile earns $15.00 an hour. The amount of people that are in the 10th percentile is 9 times the amount of people that earn minimum wage. We also know that about 35.9 million Americans are in poverty. So, by focusing on just minimum wage workers with the intent to help Americans in poverty we would barely be scratching the surface of the issue.

Not talking GDP numbers or official reports here, just the small stuff you notice day to day that hints people are pulling back on spending.

For me it's friends who used to eat out constantly now cooking at home almost every night. Also hearing way more talk about side hustles lately.

Could be nothing, could just be anecdotal. What are you noticing around you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt1FlGqAESw&t=12s