I got my first job at sixteen years old at a local McDonald’s. This was in the fall of 2014, and because I lived in upstate New York, I was paid $8 an hour.

It was around this time that I started thinking of my purchases in terms of time. A gallon of milk was around $3, or slightly less than half an hour of labor. The cost of the average meal at McDonald’s was around $7; when a customer ordered a large Big Mac meal, they were spending what would take me about an hour to earn. It would cost about $35 to fill up my car with gas, or around four and a half hours of labor.

In January of 2015, New York State raised the minimum wage from $8.00 to $8.75, and the general manager responded by cutting every crew member’s hours significantly. The lower managers would say stuff like, “I’m sorry, but because they increased the minimum wage, we can’t afford to give everyone the same hours.”

For the next week or so, everyone was working so few hours that they were actually making less at $8.75 than they would’ve been making under their full schedule at $8.00. The lesson was clear: raising the minimum wage was actually bad, because businesses would be forced to cut hours.

After about two weeks or so, however, everyone’s hours went back to normal. This just so happened to coincide with an increase in business; as I would later learn, the week or two after the holidays ended was always the slowest part of the year at our store. Busy holiday shoppers were no longer stopping off at McDonald’s to get quick food, and for the beginning of January, people were still attempting to stick by their New Year’s resolutions of eating healthy. Turns out, the cutting of our hours was due to the natural, predictable slowing of business around this time.

Fast forward a year. I am now seventeen, still working at McDonald’s, and the minimum wage has just lifted again from $8.75 to $9.00. It is, in hindsight, a remarkably tiny improvement, but once again the general manager responded by cutting hours. The same explanation was given. “Sorry, these new wage increases are really forcing our hand.” “It’s basic economics: this is just what happens.” And, like last time, everyone’s hours returned to normal after the first two weeks of January. Up until 2019, I would come back to this McDonald’s during my summer and winter breaks in college, and every January the exact same thing would happen.

When discussing the possibility of raising minimum wage to $15 an hour, I think it’s important to remember that so much of what we learn about this issue is bullshit. When it comes to even the slightest of wage increases, companies will make a big show of how much this is hurting them, and we all just kind of accept it unthinkingly.

Back in 2018, the Tim Hortons franchise responded to a mandatory $2 wage increase by reducing employee benefits. Based on the news coverage of the event, you would think they simply had no choice. It was accepted, at face value, that their claims of the government having forced their hands were honest, despite the reality that their company profit margins were… pretty fucking good? They were still turning a profit, they were in no actual danger of going bankrupt; they just needed people to associate higher wages with loss of benefits and the threat of losing their jobs altogether.

This argument against raising the minimum wage is so firmly ingrained in our culture that people don’t even realize it’s a claim that needs to be proven. They think it’s a basic truth. As a result, advocates who have spent years studying economics and researching the effects of raising the minimum wage will be met with quips like, “Don’t you understand basic math?”

The assumption is that math is on their side here. The assumption is so firmly ingrained in their minds that they don’t feel like they have to defend it. It just is. Despite the fact that there isn’t actually much evidence to suggest that raising the minimum wage will lead to job loss, this assertion is basic reality to a lot of conservatives, moderates, even liberals. When leftists argue in favor of $15 an hour, they are arguing against basic laws of nature. They are arguing for something that would obviously collapse the economy, don’t they know that? It’s basic math.

The reality is that a major minimum wage increase would very likely provide a massive boost to the economy. A major increase in spending money for millions of Americans would lead to a boost in customer spending, which would more than make up for the initial sting of having to pay employees more. It’s been proven, after all, that money given to the poor and middle class is distributed back into the economy at a much higher percentage than money given to the rich. With fast food employees making $15 an hour, that would also give other underpaid professions—like teachers and paramedics — significantly more leverage to advocate for wage increases themselves. The very idea of what constitutes a good wage would shift significantly in workers’ favor.

When opponents of the $15 an hour debate with advocates, there is a frustrating lack of effort put into their talking points.

They will point out that a fast food worker would make about as much as a paramedic, as if the obvious takeaway isn’t that we should be paying paramedics more as well, as if we can only help one or the other.

With the confidence of someone who thinks they’re making a brand new point, they will argue that an increased minimum wage will lead to massive inflation, as if the evidence for that isn’t incredibly shaky at best.

They will argue that if someone wants to be paid a living wage, they should just learn a skill and find a real job, ignoring the obvious counterpoint that someone is always going to have to hold those low-paying jobs in order for society to function.

They will then say that those jobs should go to teenagers who don’t need to have all that money, ignoring the obvious question of who exactly is going to pour their coffee at 9am on a school day if teenagers are the only ones working those jobs.

They will still make the point that a high school student shouldn’t be making $30k a year, (as if a high school student is likely to be working full time in the first place), not considering the countless number of teenagers in abusive/toxic households who could really use a livable income so they could break away from their family.

This also ignores the fact that, even if they come from loving families, high school students should be able to meaningfully save up for college or adult life in general. That’s not possible today. I worked around two years at McDonald’s before going to college, and the money I managed to save up was gone by the end of the first semester.

I spent a long time blaming myself for being bad with money, but the truth is I was never really a big spender. I was an anti-social person with inexpensive habits. I wasn’t going out to bars every weekend; I was staying home and reading books and watching TV. Still, by my second semester I had to find a part-time job just to get by. It was only in my third year, when I started working as freelance editor earning around $25 an hour, that I was able to start saving up money in a meaningful way. I had safety nets — if worse came to worst, I could always ask my parents for money — but so many people don’t.

This is how bad things have gotten: in the fifties the minimum wage was supposed to be enough for a person to support their family; today the minimum wage is enough for a college student to make it until their next paycheck, not much more. Unfortunately, a lot of people in this country think this is how it should be.

The reason for all the lazy arguments against a minimum wage increase is because a lot of the people making them don’t feel like they need to make good, thought-out arguments. They’re on the side of reality, after all. They’re the adults who understand how math works; we’re the children who just want everything handed to us.

The actual reality is that American society is uniquely designed to enforce this kind of mindset, where we accept that helping the lower class in any significant way is impossible, that even if we tried to help them it would just backfire and hurt them even more. Everything about this country is designed to stifle class consciousness.

For instance, we’re one of the only countries that don’t include sales taxes on the price of an item. A lot of Americans don’t realize this, but it’s pretty rare in most other countries for customers to have to pay more for an item than what it says on the tag. Usually, the sales tax is taken into account when setting the price, so the customer doesn’t need to do the math just to make sure they can afford it. Intentionally or not, this conditions you to hate the idea of taxes even more than you already do. This policy is designed to make you feel the pain of paying taxes in a way you simply wouldn’t if they’d just given you the actual price up front. It’s one of the many things that provokes that instinctual repulsion against an increase of any kind of taxes, even if it’s just relegated to the upper income bracket.

We have a media that conditions us to think of billionaires and CEOs as geniuses who have our best interests at heart. Mainstream outlets take for granted that a person who is good at running a business is not only also good at knowing what’s best for the economy as a whole, but is also being honest about their understanding about what’s good for the overall economy. If the CEO of McDonald’s says a minimum wage increase will be bad for the economy, there’s very little question of whether there’s a conflict of interest there. We assume that what’s good for shareholders and what’s good for the economy are the same thing.

We have a society that’s been taught to hate minimum wage employees, even while we rely on them for so many of the services that run our lives. Think of the contempt in people’s voices when they call a fast food employee a burger flipper, the weird mocking tone in which they say the word janitor in the context of the $15 an hour debate.

We have a culture that encourages people to take pride in working unnaturally long hours. One of the most conservative people I’ve ever met was a manager at my McDonald’s, who worked two jobs to support his family, totaling out to around 80 hours a week. He would see this as a sign of strength. He would brag about how little sleep he got and how many more hours he was working than the rest of us, never appearing to acknowledge the fact that it was insane and inhumane for him to have to do all this just to keep his family fed. In America, people take their systemic exploitation and spin it into a narrative about their personal endurance.

We also have a government that does not raise the minimum wage gradually with inflation. The federal minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 for over 11 years now. The best move for the economy would’ve been to increase this number gradually over the years, like they’re already doing in states like New York or Washington, or in countless other nations. If they’d moved it up just fifty cents a year, (which they essentially did from 2007 to 2009), we’d be at $12.50 right now without any major shocks to the system. $15 wouldn’t seem so extreme.

Instead, the federal government handles this issue in the most inefficient manner possible: by waiting until public pressure grows insurmountable and only then raising it. It isn’t set to automatically rise along with inflation, let alone with the cost of living. This is by design. The goal is to make a minimum wage increase as noticeable and difficult as possible. It makes every boost feel like a major deal, even though the minimum wage is still far, far below what it would be if it had kept up with the cost of living since the ‘60s.

The reality is that if the minimum wage had stayed consistent with productivity and inflation since 1968, America’s lowest earners would be making around $24 an hour by now.

$15 is not asking for a lot. In fact, it’s asking for less than the bare minimum of what we should be providing our workers.

Because it’s been so long since there’s been a federal minimum wage increase, we’re at the point where raising it gradually is too little too late. It would help slightly, of course, but not enough to meaningful improve the lives of the millions of workers forced to work way too many hours, who spend more in food and supplies than most because they can’t afford to buy in bulk, people who are exhausted and stressed with little to show for it. For too many minimum wage workers, $15 is necessary now. They can’t afford to wait another 10 years for it to slowly reach that point.

This has put activists in a tough position because, although the impacts will be an overall positive, the act of doubling the minimum wage in such a short period would undoubtedly be a major change to our economy. There undoubtedly will be some unexpected side effects — good or bad — that would be easier to account for if the minimum wage had gone up gradually.

From a messaging standpoint, however, doubling the federal minimum wage would be great in that it would unarguably prove a lot of capitalist talking points wrong. Small incremental rises in the minimum wage tend to cause small positive effects that are easy to be obscured by other factors, but the effect of a major raise would be undeniable, and the left would be able to weaponize that going forward.

When the economy doesn’t collapse, when companies start to see the returns come in from the increased consumer spending, when millions of people are unburdened from the constant stress of working for as little as $7.25 an hour, people are going to realize that their understanding of the economy was based on lies the entire time.

They’ll see the reality that when CEOs say something will cause them to lose money, what they mean is that it’ll cause them to maybe not make as much. They’ll see the reality that so much of our understanding of what’s good for the economy is really based around what’s good for shareholders, not what’s good for the working class. When this is made clear, it will be easier for advocates to continue pushing for minimum wage increases going forward. Because let’s face it: In reality, $15 an hour isn’t nearly enough.