President Joe Biden says his call for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage may not survive as part of the pending pandemic relief package. He has vowed to pursue it as standalone legislation later — a promise that needs to be advanced with a sense of urgency. The pandemic has demonstrated just how close to the economic edge too many working Americans live. The pre-pandemic economic boom brought unprecedented new wealth to the wealthy and was good to much of America's middle class, but real wages in many states have been stagnant for decades. It's past time for a reasonable national standard.

Pandemic relief may not be the best vehicle for a wage hike, anyway, for the simple reason that a fair living wage is an imperative that existed before the coronavirus and will remain a crucial issue after the virus threat ends.

America today is experiencing an income gap between the top and bottom rungs of society not seen since the early years of the last century. Today, greater and greater portions of the nation's wealth are being concentrated among a small group of top earners. The working class, meanwhile, has been cut out of the economic expansion that has generally helped everyone else in recent years.

This can be traced in part to the astounding fact that, even as the economy in the past decade has reached new heights in terms of the stock market, corporate profits and overall employment, the federal minimum wage hasn't moved one cent from its 2009 level of $7.25 an hour — an unsurvivable wage, pandemic or not. Many states have attempted to mitigate that outrage by upping state minimum wages (where they exist), which has led to the unintended consequence of a patchwork of wages that change, often significantly, upon crossing a state border.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts a $15 federal minimum wage would cost some 1.4 million jobs by 2025 and add $54 billion to the deficit over 10 years because of higher expenses in government purchasing. But those lost jobs are by definition jobs that pay less than a living wage; the same CBO report shows almost a million workers would be pulled out of poverty and another 17 million would see pay raises. The projected addition to the deficit is pocket change compared to the $2 trillion a Republican Congress added to that tab in 2017 for a tax cut for the rich that, once again, left working people out in the cold.

Opponents of a $15 federal minimum wage like to cherry-pick data that can appear to blame minimum wages for business exoduses from high-wage states like California and Illinois. But that's less an argument against state minimums than it is for a higher federal minimum. There shouldn't be anywhere in America where a business can go to pay its workers less than a fair living wage.

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