That's pretty interesting given that the impression in the media is that minimum wages have gone down dramatically compared to the past. But that's not borne out by the stats (there is some depression, but not much compared to the mean).
What must be going on is the average take home for non-college educated has gone down (or stagnated) combined with increased expectations -driven perhaps by the media (I should be able to have two cars and multiple phones, and go out and spend money, etc).
It did mostly stay above $10 from 1960 to almost 1980, so it's down ~30% from there.
One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that the Legislative Reorganization Act in 1970 is the primary driver for income inequality in the US.
Somewhat unintuitive theory, but the idea is that prior to the act, congressional votes were secret. You got the totals, but not which congressperson voted yes or no. In that situation, a congressperson could take lobbyist money, but vote however they wanted to. The lobbyist had no way to verify if they actually got the vote they paid for.
I'm not an expert in the wording, but you can read quotes from several people on it, and it's clear that they were blind or mostly blind prior to the act. By "mostly blind", I mean things like a verbal vote, but at a time that would be hard to predict, and no CSPAN, paper transcript, etc, to record what exactly happened other than the totals.
What must be going on is the average take home for non-college educated has gone down (or stagnated) combined with increased expectations -driven perhaps by the media (I should be able to have two cars and multiple phones, and go out and spend money, etc).
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