• Uh, no? The first state to actually ban smoking was in 2002, minimum wage was already too low to get by and literally not a single person I know was able to buy a house on a single income. I graduated college then and it was a massive recession still happening from the dot com crash. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickle and Dimed about how it is impossible to get by on a minimum wage in 1996 and was already calling for a 15 dollar minimum wage. The US made no progress.