The vast majority of Americans know they
couldn't support their families on the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage. According to a new poll, just 20 percent believe they could "support your household on a minimum-wage salary, which comes out to $1,250 per month, or about $15,000 per year."
The poll, done by Public Policy Polling for Americans United for Change, also finds 54 percent support for raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, with 37 percent of Republicans supporting it, which PPP's polling memo notes is "an unusually high level of support from GOP voters for an Obama backed policy initiative." And Obama has indeed been pushing $10.10 hard enough that you would expect many Republicans to oppose it on principle (the principle being f*** Obama).
Asked "Many big companies oppose raising the minimum wage, even though their minimum wage employees make so little they are eligible for Medicaid and food stamps. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? 'It's wrong that profitable companies get this kind of indirect subsidy from the taxpayers by paying poverty-level wages,'" 61 percent of those polled agreed; 74 percent agreed that "Someone who works full-time should be paid enough to keep them out of poverty."
It's particularly interesting to contemplate the 20 percent of people who say they could support their households on $1,250 a month. Some, surely, are people earning far, far more who take the view that they could lifehack poverty better than any minimum-wage worker and be happy and comfortable on $1,250 a month. But it's entirely possible that others are earning minimum wage and only getting part-time hours, thinking "man, a full-time income would be great." Or people who've been jobless for six months or more and lost their emergency unemployment aid while facing discrimination in an economy without enough jobs to go around. That's the sad thing: America has enough people struggling in poverty and enough rich people who think they're smart enough to do poverty better to leave a big question mark about who thinks they could live on $1,250 a month. Because you just might be able to live on it, but in the vast majority of the country, you wouldn't be living well.