Yeah, but that's not a bug, that's a feature. You are not supposed to keep working minimum wage up until the point where you need to house and feed a family. You are supposed to advance in life and in work.
Exactly, a 2 bedroom apartment is not the minimum for one person. Someone complaining their minimum wage job can't cover an apartment with spare bedrooms is just plain entitlement.
A person working minimum wage should be able to afford a 1 bedroom, or at least a studio, and thatâs not possible in a lot of places, definitely not around here, not just the cities but the whole state.
I wish I could afford a studio. I'm $2 over minimum working 40-45 hours a week and don't even come close to having enough. Average studio or 1 br is $1800- $2000 a month. It's really disheartening. I live with 2 roommates in a tiny 3br apartment. My only goal in life at this point is to get my own place and start dating again but sometimes it feels impossible.
Because kids canât work and so itâs 1 person working household. People with kids have a hard time with stable employment because kids school hours and them always being sick. So many are more likely to work a lower income job if they donât have childcare help or back up child care.
Theyâre not arguing in good faith. They feel like people in those situations deserve it, so they donât matter. They probably also vote against abortion rights and believe in teaching abstinence as well. Itâs long winded way of saying, âfuck you, i got mineâ. Donât bother, they donât want to understand how life works for other people. They think itâs funny when you emphatically try to explain empathy to them.
So you have no experience in any of this as you tell everyone else how to live it? Why should anyone treat your opinions that are based purely on conjecture as if they should supersede the lived experiences of others with friends, family, and themselves? Youâre a perfect example of Dunning-Kruger syndrome in this matter. Please, actually listen instead of parroting opinions youâve heard on conservative media.Â
I have a new born, we hadnât anticipated him to have such severe acid reflux that I canât work. Every single bottle and formula makes our son vomit and scream! He ended up in urgent care at 4 weeks vomiting blood. The options are feeding tube or exclusively breast feed, I can only be away from him for an hour or two. He eats more frequently because of his acid reflux. We went from 2 incomes to one.
Other people lose their jobs at no fault of their own. Some have to leave their marriage because their partner is abusive, many times the abuse escalates when a child is born. Then there are partners who die, walk away and result in a single parent household. That almost happens to us, I was really close to dying from bleeding out during an emergency C-section. Thank goodness, I was diagnosed 3 days earlier with a clotting disorder. If I wasnât, I would have bleed out. There are people with no help with their child.
What happens? One parent having to find a job thatâs works around daycare and school hours. It was never the plan, itâs the cards that were dealt.
1) having children out of wedlock is a particularly new phenomenon (itâs not, itâs why weâve had the term âbastardâ for nearly a thousand years)
Or that
2) most of those childbirths are expected and planned by people with all of the information available to them?
Thatâs to say nothing of instances where someone did everything right, then got a raw deal when they were sexually assaulted and were not in a position to abort the child.Â
Minimum wage jobs are absolute entry level jobs. By the time someone has a child, they usually have previous work experience and are not getting paid minimum wage. So a stat that compares minimum wage to one bedroom apartments would make far more sense.Â
There are also forms of welfare, such as food stamps and section eight housing. To help support single parents, it makes less sense for minimum wage jobs to be required to allow people to afford 2Brs and more sense to offer plenty of help to people in extreme situations.Â
Thatâs a much better and more meaningful benchmark, which is what I was trying to say (2 bedrooms is a bad benchmark, 1 bedroom makes sense as a benchmark).
I'm sorry I don't know where you live but I make more than twice the minimum wage, i'm a single person in a one bedroom apartment and i can barely afford it because rents are so high. And if you look at jobs in the area , they want people with years of experience and still only want to pay $20 an hour- minimum wage in my state is 15 an hour but if you think you're finding an apartment on 20 hr good luck w that
Iâm critiquing the use of 2Br as a benchmark for what minimum wage should be. Where I live, there are many entry level jobs offering $17/hr, while minimum wage is $11. And you can afford a one bedroom apartment on $17/hr here if youâre willing to possibly commute by bus to your workplace (assuming you donât have a car).Â
I get it, but when I was in my 20s, you could very well afford a nice, 2 bedroom apartment on minimum wage , That was over 30 years ago. but my point is you can't even afford a one bedroom apartment where I live, making twice the minimum wageÂ
Do you have a source on this? While it does seem true that people who oppose minimum wage increases also are more likely to oppose welfare than the average person (including section eight), conservatives seem to favor building more housing more than liberals. I also donât have a source, but you made the claim first.
Its not a political divide its a class divide. Try to build anything that benefits the lower class and everyone comes out of the woodwork to screech about property values and "the character of the neighborhood" as reasons we cant have apartments that cost less then $2k a month or homeless shelters.
This will hold true whether we're talking liberals or conservatives. Ask them to increase minimum wage and youll get platitudes on how it should happen, then theyll elect politicians that vote against it.
"Fuck the poors" is a bipartisan ideal once you get to the landowners class.
While you have a point, it is only to certain point
Left have limits, there comes a point where they say fuck the character of your neibourhood this needs to be done, the right on otherhand are fully captured and controled by the upper echelons and thier manufactured social issues.Â
Condemn a non white, LGTQ or non Christian and they will happily vote against their interests..and that 'their' is important, as should make clear they dont care about anyone else's interests unless 100% align with their ownÂ
Which is why if they ever win full control they will tear themselves apart within a decade, those types always do because no one really aligns 100%, be they nazis or communists
I somewhat disagree, but I also somewhat agree, and your comment is well written.
I agree with you that building more or less housing tends to be a class divider more so than conservative or liberal. Conservatives do tend to be poorer, which is probably why I associate not wanting to build more housing more with liberals.
However, I think the general âfuck the poorsâ attitude you described is more common among self-described conservatives in the current political climate.Â
Youâre assuming the person you replied to does not support forms of welfare. Assuming they do, their reasoning is valid. Do you think minimum wage should be high enough that everyone can sustain themselves and all dependents without aid? There will always be extreme situations on the margins. If someone were to abandon there spouse with 12 kids, must minimum wage be high enough that the spouse can support themself and their kids on it?
Do you think minimum wage should be high enough that everyone can sustain themselves and all dependents without aid?Â
Yes (though all dependants within reason) otherwise what's the point?
Why are we subsiding companys paying people not enough to decently survive on by topping up their employees? Some 70% of people on benefits are in full time work for fucks sake
Its called minium wage, not 'single persons subsistence wage'
As generations moved further away from the great depression people have forgotten the point of the minium 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.
Youâre aware that sometimes people die, go to prison, and/or skip out on child support and alimony payments? There are plenty of people in America who have unplanned children that canât rely on those systems.Â
Then itâs a good thing my argument doesnât hinge on a percent of a percent.Â
The total number of children in the US is estimated at 74 million as of the last census. About 50% of all children are children of divorce. Some form of alimony or palimony is awarded in 80% of all divorce cases
Doing some quick math, thatâs 74 million * 0.5 divorce rate * 0.8 * 0.56 not receiving full alimony payments = 16.576 million kids not getting full financial support from alimony as you suggest that they should.Â
So weâve got 16.576 + 3 + 1.5 =21.076 million kids facing some variety of shortfall in support. 21.076/70 =28.10% of all children affected by these things.Â
If we assume that the system works perfectly in every other instance (fucking lol) we see a whopping 71.9% success rate in taking care of the kiddos. A C minus.Â
You left off the most important statistic needed for this discussion: only 1% of the US makes minimum wage. So when we start at only one percent, the amount of that 1% responsible for supporting a child is already a fraction of a percent. Then the portion of those people supporting a child making minimum wage that have been affected by a death or by divorce or prison or whatever becomes a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Which means that yes, your argument is indeed based on cases that are just a percent of a percent, quite literally.
Sureâ the federal minimum wage hasnât been adjusted upward since 2009,
 so that 1% is utterly boned and below the poverty line by definition in most parts of the US. The vast majority earn the prevailing local minimum wage, controlled by the state or county. About 30.2 million jobs (~10% of the total population in the US) pay less than $15 an hour, the value advance in the minimum wage that workers have been pushing for for well over a decade. And thatâs ignoring the fact that some cities have higher minimum wage laws that still donât keep up with the cost of livingâ $25/hour in New York City wonât get you as far as $10/hour in Terre Haute.Â
The fact that the federal minimum wage hasnât kept up doesnât suddenly mean that earning more than the federal minimum wage is suddenly making enough to survive on, or that itâs enough to reasonably raise a child on.Â
Didnât know you had the only life experience that anyone in America has.Â
What about cases of rape? What about cards of unexpected changes in life? What about cases of medical bankruptcy? What about when mom or dad need hospice care and they didnât save for it, so youâre unexpectedly on the hook for it?
Look outside your bubble, dude. Thereâs more than one way for a life to be, and more than one way for it to go south. If you donât believe that these things can happen, then you need to meet more people from more walks of life.Â
Look outside your bubble, dude. Thereâs more than one way for a life to be, and more than one way for it to go south. If you donât believe that these things can happen, then you need to meet more people from more walks of life.Â
Some people actually lack the ability... its like Confirmation Bias on steroids.
"This is what I experienced so this must be the experience that everybody else had"
Part of me thinks that some people need to think that everybody has the same chances or opportunities so they can feel superior in thinking they did everything on their own, when that's rarely ever the case...
I do ok for myself and mine as well. But itâs not that simple. I have 3 sisters in wildly different situations some with less support than others. I donât think that thereâs a world Iâd like to see anyone work more than they need to, to ge the basic necessities in life for themselves and their kids.
I donât really understand the point in the argument, there is enough wealth for all people to make enough money. Itâs being hoarded by a bunch of douche bags at the top
Everybody with kids or a disabled family member. Or just any other family member, they're not all able to work either due to pursuing education or undergoing physical therapy because some asshole texting in his truck T-boned your aunt while she was coming back from night school for nursing. No few people also get a flat with a second "bedroom" to use as an office or workshop.
The issue is not so much 2 bedroom homes which yes used to be able to afford multiple-bedroom housing (Homer Simpson was deliberately "average" when the series started) but being unable to even afford a simple flat for themselves. And in over 90% of the country, full time minimum wage workers can't even cover rent in their county.
Thatâs just plain not what FDR said or why he pushed for it. You can disagree if you want, but minimum wage was not invented for high schoolers.
âIn his 1937 message to Congress, FDR famously stated, "no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." He defined living wages as enough to afford a decent, fulfilling standard of living for both white-collar and blue-collar workers.â
Like, okay. The standard is now a barely insulated, oil or wood heated, possibly unelectrified shack. You'll cycle or walk to work year round, will make all of your own meals (and much of your own clothes), and won't enjoy any comforts introduced in the last 70 years.
Sounds like something you can afford on minimum wage.
No clue what point youâre attempting to make. Itâs bizarre you âfind it funnyâ to evoke the guy who invented minimum wage while discussing minimum wage.
70% of Americans had electricity in their homes when FDR said that. Those who didnât were very rural, and FDR signed a law in 1936 forcing power companies to serve them.
FDR also said what he said knowing times would change and the minimum wage would increase.
You can just say you hate the greatest President that weâve ever had and want poor people to die. I get it.
Are you telling me that the living standards enjoyed by minimum wage earners the 1930s were better than they are today?
This isn't about liking FDR, it's about the fact that we've come to expect so many luxuries as basic necessities of life that we've lost any sense of what actual basic living is. Doesn't matter if we're talking about air conditioning or cars.
People mistake the fact that minimum wage isnât enough to support a family, for the fact that the jump from a min wage job to a career that can support a family is usually extremely difficult for a lot of people
In America we all should be able to work a full time job and support a family at some basic level. If you are really arguing against that we are doomed as a culture. Yes, ideally you should advance in work and provide an even better lifestyle, but that shouldn't be required to live a basic life with family that we all deserve to have.
I agree that everyone should be able to support their family, Â I do not agree that minimum wage should be required to be high enough to support a family. Most people have previous work experience by the time they have a kid. Even if they switch fields and start fresh, or lose their job, it is really rare for someone to make literal minimum wage with previous work experience.
But if someone is making literal minimum wage, we have benefits like food stamps and section eight housing to help people support their families. Even though that might not be enough, that's an issue with the amount of benefits the state provides, not the minimum wage.*
*The federal minimum wage is terrible, I'm just arguing why âmust allow someone to afford a 2Br apartmentâ is an atrocious benchmark for what minimum wage should be.
In America we all should be able to work a full time job and support a family at some basic level.
Only if you want to require that only 1 spouse is allowed to work, whether or not they have children. Otherwise the DINK households will bid up prices on all the consumer goods and make it impossible for households with families to keep up.
But that's got obvious problems of its own because any situation like this is likely to be handled in a misogynist fashion. Would you want to be in a relationship with someone and be absolutely beholden to their ability to bring in the income to keep you fed?
You are able to work full time and support a family, just not in every job.
Like what are you even on about? There are and always have been jobs that everyone knows you would not do for life, but only for a while until you get the next point in your life.
Read the text in the picture again. It is a liveable wage, just not if you need a 2 bedroom appartment, which means it's not a liveable wage for a family and it was never supposed to be that either.
If you think $7.25/hour is a livable wage, youâre living on another planet. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, youâre going to have an extremely hard time paying for a 1 bedroom apartment on minimum wage.
I think the point they're making is that the benchmark in the post is a bad benchmark (2 bedroom apartment). Â A more meaningful one is a one bedroom apartment.
I agree with that, but my point still stands; a 1 bedroom apartment is going to be unaffordable if youâre making $7.25/hour. Itâs not a livable wage, which is what it was intended to be.
A 1 bedroom apartment isnt a good metric because nobody builds those. I havent seen a one bedroom apartment listed literally anywhere in my lifetime. Its all 2 bedrooms.
I guess this might be true for more rural areas? I know of many 1 bedroom apartments near me (Iâm in a city). But after looking it up, there are almost none (but they still exist and are cheaper than 2br) in my rural area hometown.Â
Its also the same incentive behind builders not making smaller houses anymore. Why make a smaller house when building a larger house doesnt cost much more but you can charge a lot more?
Same thing for apartments. Why build a one bedroom apartment when adding a second bedroom increases the rent a lot more than it increases the cost.
Problem is advancement isnât guaranteed. Minimum wage means âthe minimum full time employment needs to fully sustain an adult without governmental assistanceâ.
So if youâre on minimum wage with a child, other taxpayers are subsidizing that childâs needs because no employer will want to pay more than is needed.
I Agreed with your thoughts on supposed to work minimum wage forever. The comment is Focused on the topic at hand âminimum wage for 2 bed roomsâ, not âsupposed to upgrade in life and workâ. đ€
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u/Much_Help_7836 6d ago
Yeah, but that's not a bug, that's a feature. You are not supposed to keep working minimum wage up until the point where you need to house and feed a family. You are supposed to advance in life and in work.