Say it with me now: Fuck the family income metric!
FUCK THE FAMILY INCOME METRIC!
how many millions of single people/perpetually single people are out there? We’re defining the economic health of our population by a metric that demands a dual income. So yes, 2x the typical salary is enough for a person to get by on. 2 people have to share resources to make ends meet.
For someone like myself who is perpetually and indefinitely single, working full time in a psudo-managment position, it’s beyond insulting that I’m “forced” to live in people’s basements or garages if I want to keep the slightest glimmer of hope of retirement… A “legitimate” apartment would cost the entirety of my income not even the sadly “typical” 3/4ths.
(don’t castrate me for the management thing lol. I’m not the coffee holding office whip cracker, I’m working directly along side my team in a factory doing most of the heavy lifting so they don’t need to.)
What older folk often forget is that not only could they easily afford a house in the 60s and 70s, but they likely also could on a single income. Many people nowadays are having trouble affording a house on dual incomes.
Housing keeps going up and couples are now having to split them with other couples just to raise a family. My sister and her fiance live in the basement of a house where his brother and sister-in-law live upstairs with a toddler and twins on the way. They won’t have enough room soon and can’t afford anything larger, and my sister wants to start having kids soon but the basement isn’t exactly larger either.
That’s one house for 4 working adults and potentially 4 children, when back in the day you could have a full house with 2 adults and 3-4 children on a single income.
My grandpa worked as a landscaper/gardener and was still able to support his stay-at-home wife and 3 children.
You can afford a 2 bedroom apartment now though. You just need to sleep in your car because you live 300 miles from work.
That is one good thing that WFH did. I know several people who moved from LA to our middle of nowhere town where a nice 3br house is under $150k.
Damn bro, that’s actually pretty inexpensive. Do you have fiber out there, or heck cable? Because that’s… That’s some pretty cheap housing.
Yup, they’re actually installing FTTC in my neighborhood now.
The only drawback is that it’s rural Texas.
But, if enough liberals move here for affordable housing…
no
Genuine question:
Is minimum wage being rent for a 2br/1ba actually the goal? Why?
I assume the idea is to be able to support a family and the sad logic that it often comes out “cheaper” to have one parent work and one stay at home rather than try to afford daycare.
But rent is just a drop in the bucket when you are raising a kid. Which gets back into the mess of how you can afford to have a family on minimum wage.
If the idea is just cost of living then the answer is actually a one bedroom (which would also, theoretically, help with housing shortages). If the idea is to be able to have a family then it needs to be a whole lot higher than a two bedroom (unless you work in NY and commute from one of the last remaining cheap parts of Jersey, I guess?).
This is saying that minimum wage should be enough to afford a 2br apartment. If all your money goes to rent, you can’t afford it.
Yeah, ideally rent should be around 1/3rd of your income. In my town, a conservative 2br 1ba apt is gonna cost you about $2000. That means minimum wage would have to be around $34.
Alternatively, with our minimum wage currently at $15.45, that means a two bedroom apartment would have to be priced below $900.
Ideally rent shouldn’t exist because everyone needs housing.
Sure, but then you gotta build your own, and provide protection for yourself, and maintain your own power grid, water supply, garbage, and sewage. I get what the libertarians dream of with their limited government and no taxation, but we can’t do it all ourselves, at least not anymore. If someone wants to live in western Wyoming and work the land, then good for them, but I like my internet and my frozen pizza.
I’d like to expand (ramble) on this a little more and say that “necessities” aren’t free and never have been (Disclaimer: I’m America, and this written from an American’s perspective, ymmv). You could find a cave near a river and try to make due with what nature gave you, but you’re gonna fight a bear for the cave eventually. Can you kill a bear? Or would you rather pay someone who knows how to kill bears to kill the bear for you. Suddenly your free housing isn’t free any more. Humanity is based on the exchange of goods for services. Money facilitates that trade because it allows the buyer and the seller to determine what they need and be agnostic to where the money comes from or goes to. A lot of people (not you, I don’t know you), think that we should return to a bartering system, but the current economy is still just that, but instead of trading a three loaves of bread for a pound of chuck we give the equivalent of three loaves of bread as slips of paper that can be exchanged for things other than bread because not everyone needs three loaves of bread.
Now, back to “free” housing, I agree. In a modern society like the one we have supposedly built, housing (and healthcare, basic food needs, education, protection, etc.) should be provided by the government as an assurance for a better civilization. However, that money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is taxes. So, in order for those free things to be “free” we need an overhaul of the tax system and the welfare system, but neither of those will come because we have many different groups of people in power that have done an exceedingly good job of dividing us while consolidating their empires. So, we’re fucked.
However, there is a solution, and often you can see it tagged on the concrete monoliths erected to the power-hungry overloads. We have to eat the rich, and I mean that literally. We have to eat a few of them. Make an example of them. Let the other rich know that we mean business. If they start to get out of line, eat a few more. But we have to be united across borders. If I’m eating an oligarch in New York, I need to be sure that another is being eaten in Seoul, Paris, and Tokyo. We can’t give them a safe haven. They have to believe that no matter where there go, there is some dude with a bucket of bourbon maple glaze and stronger will than them. If Musk is going to Mars, we need to get there first. We must establish a base of operations throughout the solar system to ensure that no planet is a safe space for the masters. We need to be able to dip them in the atmosphere of Venus like a sulfur fondue. We split their yolk on Mercury’s sunny-side. We scrape off layers like Italian ice on Neptune. The universe holds a diverse and wonderful menu for us, we need but provide the ingredients.
Sure, but then you gotta build your own, and provide protection for yourself, and maintain your own power grid, water supply, garbage, and sewage.
Ouch, imagine believing this. No wonder you can’t help but gag on the capitalist cock that’s been shoved down your throat, you’re so downtrodden that you need it as a feeding tube.
Go look at more competent socialist democracies before you say something can’t be done when it already is.
I’ll even give you a clue where it starts, with limiting the amount of personal value an individual can extract from the sum total of society.
I think you need to finish reading the comment you’re quoting because I think you two might actually get along
God you people are fuckin insufferable.
We’re insufferable because you lack vision beyond the capitalistic hellscape you already inhabit?
I get where you’re getting at since it’s a minimum standard of living. Two bedrooms basically means parents in one room, 1-2 kids in another. With two children being the default. Once you get to three or more, or for people who don’t want mixed gender siblings in the same room/heavy age differences, then the two bedroom becomes the three bedroom.
I definitely err on your side of the logic though. That is technically minimum. In reality, there’s enough money for that three bedroom, the rich just hoarde it all. Most landlords got nothing to do with that lol.
I am a lot more skeptical of how high a “minimum wage” could even be considering the further automation of even “skilled” fields at this point. Which is why I am a strong advocate for Universal Basic Income to decouple survival from labor.
But if you are fighting the minimum wage fight: At least fight for something that would actually cover cost of living.
That’s not how supply and demand works. If you raise minimum wage so that it can pay for a two bedroom apartment, then demand for two bedroom apartments will skyrocket pushing the price put of range once more. The only way to do this is to couple the wage increase with artificial availability by creating rent controlled, minimum wage housing.
I live in the “Greater Jackson Hole” metro area which includes two Teton counties. One in Wyoming and one in Idaho (Wydaho). Our area is full of billionaires as well as double and triple digit millionaires. You will never see a “conservative” area with more aggressive nature conservation efforts than here. Why? Because the area is paradise and the billionaires have bought all the land in order to keep it pristine (and get a nice tax break). Unfortunately, everyone tried to move here during and after lockdown and now prices are ludicrous. The thing is that the rich still need services and workers to keep that quality of life up. What was the fix? They built affordable housing for the local workforce. Some of these include store/shop spaces on the first floor for practically zero rent as long as your business is helpful to the community or raises the quality of life. So many artisinal bakeries, coffee shops, yoga/Pilate’s studios, high end dog supplies and grooming, cultural artifact shops, etc. Seriously, the entire population of the area is roughly about 30k and I have access to more top tier coffee shops here than I did in the infamously hipster Austin, Texas.
If you ever want to know what systems will be effective, just look at what the mega-rich do for their own self-interest.
EDIT: During the early days of the lockdown, private jets were flying in with medical equipment (respirators) and supplies for the entire community. A billionaire couple donated some of the first COVID-19 blood test machines in the nation. If you tell me that in five years this area will have government subsidized living wages and free healthcare for all, I will believe you…as long as the program is tied to local service industry employment because the mega-rich won’t do anything unless it benefits them somehow.
The market is not an act of nature. It is not cause and effect. It is not a religion based on faith and inexplicable. Every step of the way described as happenstance or cause and effect is in fact a human being making a decision how to better enrich themselves at the expense of someone else. The market is an elaborate excuse to avoid accountability by greedy sociopaths.
People looking out for themselves is in their nature. Animals do the same. People cooperate when they see that it is to their mutual advantage to do so, just as many animals evolve to do. People are animals. Animals are nature!
Calling people sociopaths for looking out for their own interests is to stretch the word so far it becomes meaningless. Everyone is a sociopath, except you and your friends, right? Right.
If I go through these simple 18 steps I can reduce your argument to “everyone is a sociopath except myself”. Sorry I dont deal with bad faith arguments or defend words that arent mine. Thanks though
I know you guys are talking about the US and some things work differently over there, but why should a minimum wage cover more than… the minimum? Want more, do more.
Why is one roommate the minimum? Why not 10, or 20, or 50?
Because the idea was always that we need a living wage.
It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living. -FDR
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9075220-it-seems-to-me-to-be-equally-plain-that-no
1 person requires 2 rooms now
also a fountain
Or put in a way that the conservatives can understand: if a person works full time for a company, the tax payers should not have to subsidize that company by supplying the necessary benefits to bridge the pay gap for basic necessities.
(Unfortunately, their leaders would easily convince them how good an idea it is to give tax dollars back to the corporations, and how it is a social good to humiliate lesser people that don’t deserve full personhood, in order to inspire them to be more valuable resources for their employers)
No certain I agree 2 bedroom for minimum, but definitely getting a single bedroom or studio near where they work makes a whole lot of sense.
That sounds ok until you realize how many people have kids at least half time, but no adult partner. And a lot of those people don’t make much above min wage.
Even if they make slightly more than minimum now, a rising tide lifts all ships.
Plus minimum wage was intended to be the lowest single wage a family could be supported on. Just requiring it cover a 2br apartment is a far cry from the original intent
Good point. I’d kinda expect the government to help in that situation more.
Why should the government support bad businesses? Serious question, because we socialize losses (tax-paid anssistance) and privatize profits (they keep it, regardless how many employees are on assistance).
We do that already with welfare for people working a surprising number of places (Walmart and McDonald’s are prime examples, where they have published budgets assuming you will get government assistance)
Why is that ok, but requiring living wages isn’t?
I was imagining that in terms of tax breaks. The reason being you’re pay is not tied to the number of your children. If we say minimum wage is enough to cover 2 children, then people have a financial incentive and advantage if they don’t have children. Compare that to minimum wage addresses Mainly your own costs with tax breaks and credits helping to cover child costs.
Why don’t you agree with the 2 bedroom? Why can’t the working class have some leg room?
Fuck it. Let’s make it 3 and build a gym for the whole complex while you’re at it.
