St. Louis will drop minimum wage from $10 to $7.70.

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Cerebralbore101 said:

The minimum wage should be whatever it costs to pay a single person's rent, food, phone bill, car insurance, gasoline, car payment and gym fee, while living in a studio apartment. Take the total amount of all those things find the average and add $200 just for good measure. Then divide by 40. There's your unofficial minimum wage.

Also there hasn't been a federal minimum wage increase since 2009, and before that it was something like 6.50 an hour. $7.25 an hour only gets you about $986 a month at full time. Rent for most studio apartments is $500-$700 alone. Should people live off cereal, have no phone, no car, and work 40 hours a week? That's 3rd world country conditions.

Also, all those corporate jobs that force you to work 60 hours a week for "salaried" should go out of business. That's just another way to pay below minimum.

I agree that we need to do a lot more to help the working poor, but I disagree with the bolded.

I feel like the idea that everyone needs to have their own place (no family, no roommates) and everyone needs their own car (no carpooling, no public transit) is a pretty America-centric idea.