Flat wage increase won't work

I was opposed to attaching a national $15 minimum wage to the COVID-19 bill that President Joe Biden signed into law on March 11.

I am still opposed to a national $15 minimum wage.

I am in favor of raising minimum wage to provide a better living standard for our lowest-paid workers, but I think the issue needs study and perspective before such a law is enacted.

That law should not set an arbitrary standard for the nation. That's because I think the new minimum wages should reflect realities of different regions.

A $15 per hour minimum wage comes out to $31,200 per year. That's enough to live pretty well in Tucumcari, and it's higher than Tucumcari's median household income of $26,029, which translates to $12.51 per hour.

Tucumcari's median household income is below the federal poverty rate for New Mexico, which is currently $26,208 per year.

I used a comparative pay scale placed online by a company called Nerdwallet to make some other comparisons, using the $31,200 a year one would earn at $15 per hour as the standard.

The closest I could come to an equivalent city to Tucumcari in New Mexico on the Nerdwallet site was Las Cruces, so I used that as the standard by which I measured comparative income in other areas of the country.

For instance, to live like you would live in Las Cruces on $31,200 a year, you would have to earn $89,996 in Manhattan. In San Francisco, you'd have to earn $70,704.

Turning that around, $31,200 a year in Manhattan would be the equivalent of $10,816 in Las Cruces, or $5.20 per hour, which is below even the smallest minimum wage anywhere.

The $15-per-hour annual wage in San Francisco would be the equivalent of $13,768 per year in Las Cruces, or $6.61 per hour.

The federal poverty level in the state of New York is less than $48,470 per year, according to the New York Health Department's website.

California's federal poverty level is under $33,800. In Manhattan and San Francisco, a minimum wage of $15 per hour, if not more, would make sense.

Manhattan and San Francisco are extremes.

Closer to home, we are more or less the same distance from Denver and Dallas. The $31,200 a year one might earn in Las Cruces is the equivalent of $39,857 in Denver and $39,186 in Dallas.

If you earned $31,200 in Dallas, it would be the equivalent of $24,842 in Las Cruces. In Denver, earning $31,200 would be the equivalent of garnering $24,423 in Las Cruces. Both are higher than Tucumcari's median household income.

The variation in pay and living costs throughout the country is huge. Minimum wage, too, should vary throughout the country.

I am convinced the minimum wage needs to rise just about everywhere, but Congress should consider this issue separately from other legislation and enact not a single minimum wage, but a carefully thought-out scaling of minimum wages that accounts for differences in both cost of living and expectations throughout the nation.

Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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