Affonso 2 current minimum wage is $7.25. Which, translated into the average job of 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, amounts to a salary of a measly $15,080, or approximately $1,250 a month. Although this may seem like quite a substantial sum, the truth is that after the average rent of an apartment, about eight hundred dollars a month, only leaves $450, subtract another one-hundred dollars for transportation, and that leaves you with only $350 for food and other necessities. Even increasing the minimum wage just by $2.55 you can get another four hundred dollars for other expenses at the end of the month. Many states are already on the track to increasing the minimum wage. In recent months, states such as New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Missouri, and Massachusetts are pushing to raise their minimum wage to a minimum of ten dollars an hour. Meanwhile, Senator Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, is pressing for the federal minimum wage to rise to $9.80 per hour by 2014 (Auerback, Marshall). Nearly 8 million Americans go to work every day yet still live below the poverty line. That is in part because the federal minimum wage is too low. Currently, an individual with a full-time job at the minimum wage and a family of three to support will fall below the federal poverty line. These workers, despite putting in regular hours, are struggling to provide basic necessities for themselves and their families. By allowing the minimum wage to remain at a nearly unlivable level, we have deemed certain jobs not worthy enough to meet even our country's minimum standard of living (L.A. Times). If families