Making Numbers Count

The minimum wage reset yesterday.  What will that mean to millions of American families?  We can all read the numbers: minimum wage hasn't kept pace with increases in the cost of living.  But the Center for American Progress restated the numbers in more meaningful terms.  How long does a minimum-wage worker have to work to make enough money to buy dinner for a week?  To pay for electricity for a week?  To buy a gallon of gas? 

By restating income in terms of what an hour's worth of work bought back in 1997 and what it buys today, CAP shows the impact of increasing the minimum wage.  Perhaps more telling (and easier to see) is the number of hours that low-wage workers must work in order to buy food, power and gas.  Hamburgers for a week for a family of four (no ketchup, no mustard, no desert) took 13.61 hours of work just before the change. 

The Consumer Price Index gives the across-the-board story, and a focus on a few numbers always runs the risk of cherry-picking the most dramatic.  But laying out the bare fact that it takes a minimum wage worker 13.61 hours to put a cheap dinner on the table for a family of four adds layers of meaning that percentages alone can't give. 

For those of us who work with numbers on a regular basis, we're always looking for better ways to drive home the impact of those numbers.  CAP shows us another way.

Comments

[Ex-lawyer]

While it might appear excessive - food costs as a percentage of income are cheaper in the US than almost everywhere. If low income families can feed a family of 4 for a week on less than 30% of one person's income (assuming that breakfast and lunch cost 1/2 of dinner), they're still doing better than that the average wage earner in many developed countries. For example, the average person spends more in EU members Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, or in South Korea. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/InternationalFoodDemand/