I was born to teenage parents who got married young and divorced early. My mother raised me herself, along with my six younger siblings, in Cleveland, and life wasn’t easy even in the best of times. At age 42, she died, and it fell on me, then aged 22 and working minimum wage, to take care of all of us. At the time, I was newly married with a baby son. And I was deeply afraid for our future.

My mother was born into a solidly middle-class family, but, as all too many Americans understand, everything doesn’t always go as planned—no matter how hard you work. She died on welfare. Without the support of the state, I shudder to think of where we would have ended up. As is true for millions of Americans, the social safety net saved us. It saved my mother when she was raising her children, and it saved us after she was gone. If not for food stamps, Medicaid, and various job programs, I would never have gone on to be the first in my family to go to college, the first black woman to represent my ward on the Cleveland City Council, and, ultimately, a State Senator.

For millions of families in this country like the one I grew up in, the stakes are literally life or death when it comes to benefiting from universal programs—or lack thereof. About 20,000 people a year die from not being able to afford health insurance. And Hispanic and black Americans are particularly impacted by our fatally costly health-care system: One out of four non-elderly Hispanic Americans and almost one out of 10 non-elderly black Americans are under- or uninsured. Given that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country, of course health-care costs fuel the already shameful wealth disparity between people of color and white Americans. Many families lose their homes and go into debt in order to pay for medical services.

In the fight against poverty, the difference between a $12 minimum wage and a $15 minimum is anything but immaterial. To be cavalier about that $3 difference (as some critics are, even among liberals)—a difference that is nearly half of the federal minimum wage—is, frankly, an act of privilege. And women disproportionately suffer from the austerity of low pay: Most minimum-wage workers are female, and in all but one state women make up at least 60 percent of the low-wage workforce. And in 15 states, that number is two-thirds. As my friend Kerri Evelyn Harris at Working Hero Action often points out, it takes about three hours of work at the federal minimum wage to afford one box of off-brand diapers. It takes two hours of work to buy the ingredients to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.