[mediaman]

I was a little skeptical of this because of the impact of state-level minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal, so I pulled up the data on how many people are paid the US federal minimum wage.

Turns out that 1.1 million people have jobs that pay the federal minimum wage or less. But that number does not include tips, and about 60% of those people work in restaurants or bars. It's hard to say how much in the way of tips they get, but it's fair to say that there are at least 440,000 people who are earning no more than the federal minimum wage and don't get tips to make up for it.

That's about 0.6% of the hourly workforce. For them, filling a 15 gallon tank of gas would take 10 hours of labor, or even more after deducting employee taxes.

Also, while the federal minimum wage demographic skews young, about half of the 1.1m figure above are over the age of 25.

Above data is per the BLS.

[the_lonely_road]

Doesn’t make sense to use federal average gas price here. Anyone making the federal minimum wage is in one of the lowest cost of living parts of the country and will subsequently also have one of the lowest gas prices to go along with that lowest income.

[mediaman]

It doesn't vary enough to make a big impact. Regular gas in Alabama is only about 8-9% cheaper than the national average. So it almost cuts an hour off.

[cratermoon]

Yes you note that I didn't take into account payroll taxes.