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The last time Congress voted to increase the federal minimum wage, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were both still in existence, Patrick Mahomes was just 11 years old, and Kamala Harris was the district attorney of San Francisco.

This minimum wage increase in July 2007 raised the wage floor in the United States from $5.15 to $5.85 and allowed two additional increases to $7.25 in July 2009.

The federal minimum wage has not changed since then.

Former President Donald Trump's visit to a McDonald's in Pennsylvania on Sunday marks the longest stretch without a nationwide increase in the federal minimum wage since it was established in 1938.

After briefly manning a fry station at McDonald's, Trump responded to a reporter's question about whether he supported repeal of the minimum wage.

“Well, here’s what I think: I think these people work hard, they’re great, and I just saw something, the process. It's beautiful. “It’s beautiful to see,” Trump said. “These are great franchises, they create a lot of jobs.”

Vice President Kamala Harris attacked Trump on Monday for this failure to respond, repeating her calls for a higher minimum wage without specifying what the new federal minimum wage should be.

Harris told reporters before a campaign stop in Birmingham, Michigan, that she believes “we need to raise the minimum wage.”

“My opponent Donald Trump doesn’t believe we should raise the minimum wage. And I think everyone knows that the current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, which means that the person who works a full day and a full week is going to make $15,000 a year, which essentially a poverty wage,” Harris said.

The Harris campaign did not respond to CNN's request for comment about how strongly it supports raising the minimum wage.

Opponents of raising the minimum wage often argue that overly aggressive measures would lead to job losses.

Michael Reich, chairman of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, told CNN it is entirely possible to raise the minimum wage without eliminating jobs.

“The reason is political. “It has nothing to do with economics,” Reich said of the record-breaking stretch of time without an increase in the federal minimum wage. “It’s part of political polarization.”

Efforts by Democrats in Congress to increase the minimum wage in recent years have repeatedly failed.

When asked whether Trump supported an increase in the federal minimum wage, the Trump campaign shared a statement from Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly in which she blamed Harris for “depressing real wages and prices through reckless spending.” to increase”.

“President Trump will not only restore the booming economic climate of his first term, but he will also eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay and oppose Communist China's efforts to harm American workers,” Kelly said. “Working families overwhelmingly support President Trump because only he will make America rich, strong and great again.”

While the federal minimum wage has not changed since 2009, consumer prices have continued to rise – particularly in the last three years.

This means that the purchasing power of the federal minimum wage has decreased significantly.

Reich, who has testified before Congress on the minimum wage, said there is no question that the federal minimum wage is not a livable wage.

Researchers at MIT have developed a calculator that estimates the living wage – defined as “what a full-time worker must earn per hour to cover the cost of their family's minimum basic needs where they live while remaining self-sufficient.”

Consider that even in Alabama, a lower-cost state that has not adopted a federal minimum wage, MIT's calculator estimates that the living wage for an adult without children is $20.15 an hour—or nearly three times that amount the federal minimum wage.

Due to the high cost of child care, the estimated living wage for an adult with a child in Alabama rises to $33.36 per hour. In other words, a single mother with one child earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 earns less than a quarter of what it takes to get by in Alabama.

The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is just $2.13 per hour. However, these workers must earn at least the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 or their employers will be required to make up the difference.

Although the federal minimum wage has not changed, many state minimum wages have.

Because of this, only 1.1% of hourly workers earned the applicable federal minimum wage or less in 2023, compared to 1.3% in 2022 and 13.4% in 1979, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to the Department of Labor, 30 states currently have a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. These include left-leaning states like California, where the minimum wage is $16 an hour; and New York ($15); as well as reliably Republican states like Florida ($12); Arkansas ($11) and West Virginia ($8.75).

That leaves 20 states that charge just $7.25 an hour, including Texas and the battleground states of Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Trump spoke on Sunday.

“McDonald's workers don't need photo ops; They need a living wage,” Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator and founder of We Are Somebody, a worker-centered organization that supports low-wage workers’ organizing efforts, said in a statement Sunday. “We must all come together and fight back against a system that keeps them poor while corporate managers make billions.”

McDonald's says it has increased wages by 8% for hourly workers in more than 90% of company-owned restaurants in 2022. This is in addition to a salary increase of approximately 10% in 2021.

However, the wage increases only applied to the 5% of McDonald's locations that are company-owned. The remaining 95% are owned and operated by franchisees, who can make their own decisions about how their workers are paid.

As of April 1, McDonald's workers in California have been earning at least $20 an hour due to a new state law that raises the minimum wage for all fast-food restaurant employees.

California's wage increase applies to about half a million fast food workers in the state and applies to restaurant chains with more than 60 locations nationwide. The law also created a Fast Food Council made up of restaurant and worker representatives that can raise wages annually for the rest of the decade.

Reich, the Berkeley professor, authored a recent study that found that increasing the minimum wage for fast food workers in California led to a “remarkably large” increase in workers' wages without any job losses or alarming price spikes were caused.

Reich told CNN he believes the federal minimum wage can be raised to $17 an hour without causing job losses.

“For $50 an hour, people would stop going to McDonald's. But at $17, I don’t see that negative impact,” he said. “It would have minimal impact on jobs, a small increase in prices and many benefits.”