General Thought: How about NO Minimum Wage? Information Instead! Rather than States and/or Feds setting a Minimum Wage, can I suggest NO Minimum Wage be set at all?  Setting this only enables employers to use it to establish the base costs of their projects, and entrap the public into a belief that they're getting a fair deal for labor.  One thing for sure, once it's set, it's out of date the next day. When was the last adjustment to the Federal Minimum Wage?  It was 2009, and set the current rate of $7.25/hour.  That's almost a decade ago!  Even using a modest 2% annual inflation rate (close to actual during Zero's reign), that would mean your $7.25 is worth 22% less today than when it was last set, or about $5.65 of those dollars, with a current rate of $8.84 needed to achieve parity with the 2009 rate. The rate set in 2009 was out of date almost the day it was set. Here's an idea.  How about we do not set a Minimum Wage at all?  Rather, provide the public with information.  That is, REAL information about what things are costing.  A long list of itemizations for things like cars, education, groceries, gasoline, insurance and on and on all the way down to diapers.  Let people decide which items/services they model for their own lives and add up the costs.  Then people have the power to determine their budget and salary expectations when they go in to negotiate their pay.   Work is only valuable when it pays for the things required to live life, and beyond into desirable benefits of travel, leisure and reward as warranted by their labor. Information is what we need.  Not fixed-rate pricing.