evidence: Perhaps surprisingly, not very many people earn minimum wage, and they make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last year 1.532 million hourly workers earned the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; nearly 1.8 million more earned less than that because they fell under one of several exemptions (tipped employees, full-time students, certain disabled workers and others), for a total of 3.3 million hourly workers at or below the federal minimum. [...] They’re also more likely to live in the South than anywhere else – in part because only one southern state (Florida) has its own higher state minimum wage. In both the West South Central (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana) and East South Central (Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee) regions, 6.3% of hourly workers make the federal minimum or less — the highest rates among the nine Census Bureau-defined regions. They were followed by the eight-state (plus D.C.) South Atlantic region, where 5.1% of hourly workers made the federal minimum or less. The lowest rate, 1.5%, was in the Pacific region – not surprising, given that four of the five states in that region (California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska) have their own, higher state minimums.