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Associating minimum wage with a living wage, is the stagnation it can cause in terms of individual contribution to society and loss of productivity.
Like blood pooling in a heart chamber during an afib, and then throwing a clot after the arrhythmia clears, providing an eddy or safe harbor as a permanent destination for someone of dubious energy and enthusiasm for self improvement is deadly for society.
Raising the minimum wage, tied to some economic variable, will take it out of the realm of politics and be acceptable. Making the min wage a living wage is a huge mistake.
This idea that starvation is needed for people to improve is just nonsense, not backed up by any serious research. People are social animals. People care about status. This idea that lots of people would love to be a burger flipper for 40 years if it was paid decently is just absurd.
The point of the minimum wage is to set a wage floor and increase the bargaining power of workers, so workers like bakers, pre-school teachers, bartenders, life guards, ambulance drivers, cooks, nursing assistants, hairdressers, store clerks, animal caretakers, taxi drivers etc can earn a living wage.
Yes, and it's set....it's not meant for you to live with a family of 4, it's for you to live while in school and just getting out into the world, for just a little, it was never meant to be paying job that is/was supposed to support you for the rest of your life....really...it's not there for that....
Most of the minimum wage "fight" is not intended to pass but to create political talking points and a wedge issue.
$15/hour is insane in small town Iowa, it's quite reasonable in San Francisco.
So you have people proposing national Min Wage of $15 with the purpose of then forcing the rival party to vote it down so that they can beat their chests about the evil meanies that won't increase wages for the poor.
I fully support state and local governments to set their own minimum wage levels that are reasonable for their cost of living as this is not a one-size-fits-all problem.
Lastly, if you a good worker around where I live you can easily make double minimum wage.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) already released a non-partisan study citing how the lowest capability workers would be let go and replaced by technology. The McDonalds near my house just revamped to self-order kiosks and since then I haven't seen the gal that used to work the cash register that had some sort of nuero-disorder. One of my kids works part-time at Target, they're boosting pay nationally, they're firing the lower performing workers. (ie. Costco model)
It's a complicated issue beyond petty political grandstanding.
Yes, and it's set....it's not meant for you to live with a family of 4, it's for you to live while in school and just getting out into the world, for just a little, it was never meant to be paying job that is/was supposed to support you for the rest of your life....really...it's not there for that....
Bakers, ambulance drivers, hairdressers, cooks, janitors, animal caretakers, nursing assistants, pre-school teachers, taxi drivers etc are not supposed to live in poverty just because our elected officials refuse to serve the interests of the working class. We need all types of workers. Not everyone can be some big shot.
The father of the minimum wage, Franklin D Roosevelt, was very clear that it was indeed meant to be a living wage.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. 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.
Who actually pays the minimum wage anymore? Retail, fast food joints, and related jobs all pay well above that where I live. Reason is they can't even get the teenagers out of bed for $7.25 an hour. I think the free market does a better job at dealing with wages than some government mandate.
Minimum wage secures working people's existence so the taxpayers won't have to take care of them!
Of course the answer is never to end the state run theft and redistribution scheme that makes other workers forcibly poorer and let more efficient voluntarily funded private charities provide temporary income assistance.
National minimum wage needs to be calculated as the amount of money earned per hour, before taxes, to support a single, debt-free life when one works 40 hours a week in one of the low cost of living states. State minimum wage should be adjusted upwards accordingly taking into account the respective state's cost of living. Any patriotic American needs to support a reasonable minimum wage, as it is a very necessary counter against socialism. In my opinion, minimum wage is one of the pillars of liberty and freedom in the USA. If 15$ per hour makes sense in Manhattan, then by all means, make it so.
The violent state intervening in the peaceful negotiations of employment is the exact opposite of freedom and liberty.
But the GOP tries to ban local areas from setting their own minimum wage as well. Rent is $600-$700 a month even in Kansas and Oklahoma.
We should have a federal minimum wage floor in America. If some regions want to go higher than $15 an hour, then good for them.
Hey you almost get it. If you recognize individual areas have their own min.wage requirements , you just need to apply that logic down to the level of the individual. Only the individual knows what they need to live. Of course the socialist despises individual thinking.
I don't remember a time when minimum wage job was something you could live off of. In the 80s when I was making that I lived with several roommates and ate rice and beans everyday.
Most of the minimum wage "fight" is not intended to pass but to create political talking points and a wedge issue.
$15/hour is insane in small town Iowa, it's quite reasonable in San Francisco.
Its clearly not reasonable with only a $15 minimum wage in San Francisco.
Rent in small town Iowa is what? $700 a month? Plus utilities? Whats the cost of owning a car there? No public transit there. Whats the annual cost of child care or health care there? Taxi drivers and restaurant cooks make $11 an hour in Iowa. Store clerks make $10 an hour and hairdressers, bakers and ambulance drivers make $12 an hour. Is it insane that these people get a proper raise?
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