New minimum wage fails to meet minimum needs.

The news: Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed a $1-an-hour minimum wage increase into law in December, making the state's new $7.50-an-hour wage tied for the fifth-highest in the nation. The rate takes effect in July and will continue to rise by a quarter each year until it reaches $8.25 an hour in 2010.

Behind the news: The rate still falls far short on meeting the "self-sufficiency" wage in Chicago. In 2001, Diana Pearce, then-director of the Women and Poverty Project at the Washington, D.C.-based Wider Opportunities for Women, measured a self-sufficiency standard for Chicago and concluded that, to cover basic needs such as housing and food, single-person households needed $8.57 an hour. The rate for four-person households was $10.07. Adjusted for inflation using the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Chicago metropolitan area, the 2007 living wages for single-person and four person households stand at $9.52 and $11.20 an hour, respectively. Annually, that comes out to $19,801 for a single-person household and $23,296 for a four-person home.

Though the new minimum wage rate will add nearly $2,100 annually to some paychecks, it still falls nearly $7,700 short of the self-sufficiency standard for a four-person household and $4,200 short for a single-person household.

"I wouldn't call [the increase] nothing," said Joseph Persky, professor of economics at University of Illinois at Chicago and co-author of a 2002 self-sufficiency study that used Pearce's figures. "On the other hand, it may be time to sit down and rethink the whole thing nationally."

Persky doubts that raising the minimum wage will be the unique instrument to pull people over the poverty line. Instead, he believes an orchestrated ensemble including instruments such as state earned income tax credits and needed wage hikes could offer effective help to those barely making it with minimum wage earnings.