Workers aren't living beyond their means. Workers are being denied the means to live.

Look, we know how much you need to earn to have all your basic needs fully met to the point that income is no longer a barrier to attaining happiness, and for most of the US right now, that’s a bit over $100k/year. It is criminal for anyone to be paying less than half that amount, so what we need at a bare minimum is a national $30/hour minimum wage with automatic annual COLA increases to make sure that the baseline pays enough so that people can at least *see* a point where they can genuinely thrive. It is SO fucked up that NPR was still talking about achieving a $15 minimum wage at some point in the future, when Fight for 15 started in 2009, and we’d need to raise the minimum wage to $21.17/hour just to keep up with inflation. But fuck asking for that. We should have had a $15/hour minimum 12 years ago, which means that it needs to be adjusted much higher not just for inflation, but as reparations to everyone exploited by criminally low wages for so long.