What you are tracking (and cherry picking) is the inflation rate, which naturally goes up and down over time. My point was, and remains, people are paid more today on a minimum, than they ever were intended to be when this program was created in 1938.<p>Minimum wage was intended as a baseline for unskilled entry-level jobs. Our issue today is we have a tremendous amount of folks, more than ever imagined, attempting to survive on minimum wage.<p>The solution is staunchly not to just give folks more money; we&#x27;ve been trying that for 78 years and we still have the same problem.<p>The solution is to enable people to support themselves off and above a minimum wage. We do this by empowering folks to get higher education and&#x2F;or highly skilled job training.<p>We should not have 50+ year olds working the cash register at Walmart. That&#x27;s a failure of society... and we&#x27;re not working on solving that problem. Instead, we just want an easy out; toss cash at them so we don&#x27;t have to think about this for another couple of years, never-mind that same 50 year old is still working the cash register at Walmart! That&#x27;s a flat cop-out.