Minimum wage is a paltry $7.25—and Congress hasn't raised it in 15 years

On July 24, 2009, Congress increased the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. It has not been raised since, despite President Joe Biden’s latest efforts to do so. That’s the longest span without an increase since the minimum wage was established in 1938. 

There are a lot of reasons for Congress’s failure to get it done, as Rev. William Barber explained on NPR last year, much of it boiling down to Republicans and the larger political environment. 

“[R]ather than putting a face on who's actually being hurt by the lack of living wage,” he said, “we get lost in these culture wars like fighting trans people or fighting immigrants, which is all a distraction because the extremists who push all of that stuff, what they don't want the public to know is that they are the very ones also blocking living wages and health care.”