CHART: Rethinking Our Minimum Wage

[Coyotl]

Smart Charts
Rethinking Our Minimum Wage
February 22, 2013
by John Light - http://billmoyers.com/2013/02/22/rethinking-our-minimum-wage/

Here is a part without the legends:

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Today, a single parent earning minimum wage takes home $15,080 a year. That’s $3,400 below the federal poverty line for a family of three. President Obama noted the statistic in his State of the Union Address — “That’s wrong,” he said, calling for an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour because “in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.”

The minimum wage has not always left a single income-earner for a family of three so far below the poverty line. In 1968, when minimum wage was at it’s highest point ever, that same breadwinner would have made $19,245 a year in today’s dollars — roughly a third more than he or she makes now.

In 1981, in an attempt to fight inflation, the minimum wage was frozen at $3.35 .....

[SheilaT]

1. Without the y axis being labelled

it is not possible to have any understanding of what the line really means.

[Coyotl]

2. Follow the link. The web site makes it so you can't copy the entire graph.