This sounds high to most people, but if the minimum wage had kept up with its inflation-adjusted peak (1968), it’d be somewhere in the range of $31 to $32 an hour right now.
It never caught back up afterward, and has been severely harpooned in the years since, shifting unfathomable quantities of money to the wealthiest people. And it’s not just minimum wage workers… when you sink the wage and salary floor, nearly everyone made less than they should have been.