minimum wage adjusted for true value.
The federal minimum wage has not kept up
In the town hall, Biden was referencing a data point from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank, the White House told CNN. It looked at what the federal minimum wage would be if it kept up with productivity growth. The answer: $21.45 an hour.
Dean Baker, the center’s senior economist who crunched the numbers, said he is not suggesting that the minimum wage should be raised to that level, which would cause serious disruptions to the job market and economy. But he thinks it’s important to point out how the two diverged more than 50 years ago.
For the first three decades after the minimum wage was established in 1938, it roughly kept pace with average wage and with productivity growth, rising from 25 cents at the outset to $1.60 in 1968. That buoyed workers at the bottom of the income scale along with the rest of the labor force.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inflation-productivity/index.html