The Decaying Wage Ladder: _Family Support Ratios and the Concentrated Decay of Wage-Floor Adequacy, 1984–2026_

A durable folk intuition holds that a worker earning some respectable multiple of the legal minimum wage (five times the floor is a common illustrative figure) ought to be able to support a family on one income. This paper subjects that intuition to a two-endpoint empirical test and then asks what the result means for the political philosophy of wage floors. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey's actual 1984 five-person consumer unit and the Economic Policy Institute's 2026 family budget for a two-adult, three-child household in Ottawa County, Michigan, I develop the Family Support Ratio (FSR), defined as household income at a given wage multiple divided by a family budget, and show that a single earner at five times the federal minimum wage falls below a modest adequacy budget under every read tested, with adequacy beginning near 8.4 times the federal floor. The raw longitudinal headline, a required single-earner multiple rising from roughly 4.2× in 1984 to 8.4× in 2026, is shown to be suggestive but not clean: it bundles a construct gap, a geography gap, an earner-count gap, and a payer-composition gap alongside genuine category divergence. The paper's defensible findings are narrower and stronger. First, the decay is concentrated, not general: food and transportation tracked general inflation almost exactly, while healthcare diverged by a factor bounded between 2.0 (actual-to-actual spending of five-or-more-person households over 1988–2024, a window opening four years after the 1984 anchor with the federal floor unchanged at $3.35) and 5.2 (the adequacy-standard ceiling), with the category-specific medical price index (1.75× relative divergence) confirming that price alone explains only part of the movement and payer-composition migration explaining much of the rest. Second, childcare monetized from approximately zero as a recorded budget line in 1984 to $18,652 in the 2026 adequacy budget, a structural shift inseparable from the move from the 1984 five-person unit's average of 2.2 earners to the single-earner stress case. Third, the wage ladder's decay is concentrated in the federal statute itself: against Michigan's maintained 2026 floor of $13.73, the same adequacy budget requires only about 4.4 multiples, so the 5× intuition roughly survives where the floor has been maintained and fails where it has been allowed to drift. The paper closes by arguing that a frozen wage floor quietly corrupts an entire public grammar of economic position, and that which floor counts as the floor is itself a governance choice with distributive consequences.