Parenting & Family Quote by Bernie Sanders

Sanders frames $5.15 not as a number but as an indictment. Calling it a "poverty wage" is a deliberate rhetorical turn: it flips the minimum wage from a supposed floor of dignity into an instrument that manufactures hardship. The phrase carries moral heat without drifting into abstraction. It suggests not merely that low pay correlates with poverty, but that public policy has quietly decided poverty is an acceptable outcome for full-time work.

The second sentence tightens the vise by invoking a specific, legible life: "a full-time worker with one child". That detail is doing heavy political work. It blocks the familiar dismissal that minimum-wage workers are mostly teenagers or "just earning extra money". Sanders smuggles in an alternate protagonist: a parent, clocking real hours, trying to keep a household afloat. Suddenly the debate isn't about incentives or market purity; it's about whether work, as marketed in American civic religion, actually pays.

There's also a strategic appeal to the state's own metrics: "official poverty line". By using the government's benchmark, Sanders avoids moralizing as personal opinion and instead argues that the system fails on its own terms. The subtext is sharper still: if a full-time job doesn't clear an official poverty threshold, then poverty isn't a personal failure - it's structurally priced in.

Context matters. The $5.15 figure points to a period when the federal wage lagged behind inflation and living costs, while productivity and top incomes soared. Sanders is asking readers to see that gap not as an accident of economics, but as a choice with beneficiaries.