I wasn’t aware that being full-time minimum wage was “the smallest amount of money possible”. Good news! I’ll go tell everyone who is forced to work part time, or in an unpaid internship, or can’t find a job, that they’re actually making MORE MONEY. And then they’ll magically get it, I’m sure.
You’re being absolutely disgusting insisting that people you think beneath you should be denied basic comforts. Some people are going to have to work minimum wage jobs, for our society to function. That they can’t live comfortably on it - that you think they should be forced to work over 40 hours a week and packed multiple to one room because you think “they still lead fulfilling and happy lives”, and that’s good enough for you and you feel so SUPERIOR - well, nobody should have to do that. That shouldn’t be a thing. As long as that’s a thing, our society has utterly failed. And if you support a system where that continues to be a thing, you too are an utter failure.
Expecting the poor to work over 40 hours per week and then go without any actual privacy because you think they don’t deserve it is arguing for exploitation.
First, if I mischaracterized your views, my apologies.
On there we seem to be in agreement.
My point is that the ability to do so is increasingly a luxury. when you say “lifestyle”, that is a term we should apply to people who have more choices, meaning they have the financial means to do so. I’m currently in the middle of working on a PhD, but it’s my economic circumstances that allow me this possibility. Plenty of people do not have the flexibility that I have economically. That’s just a fact of modern life. If you want everyone to have choices (I’d personally love that) then we need to radically rethink the basics of our society.
Again, spot on! No one should have to decide between housing and warmth, food and gas, rent and power. No one. Until we allow everyone to have the basics, we’re not a humane society.
hey, sweet name calling, bro! Don’t let anyone accuse you of being “dragonadult12”
I’ll just take this as a “no” then on you justifying your previous baseless accusation, by pointing out where I’d said that minimum wage workers dont deserve to live.
you’re right, it is increasingly a luxury. I’ve said before in this thread that I think the system is without a doubt deeply broken and I think we’re in agreement there. We don’t have the best safety net in the world, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t.
I think everyone would agree that in an ideal world, minimum wage would pay for a comfortable life and the finances to afford secondary education and raise a family on. It’s just not the world we happen to live in.
But who knows? One of these days we just might get candidates who have our best interests at heart, and we might even vote them into public office.
Not in Big 10 or Ivy League towns. I live outside of a Big 10 town because I could only afford a house in the worst neighborhoods in town and the apartments are more expensive than a mortgage payment just outside of town.
Clearly you’ve never spoken with economists. They know that their theories don’t usually work because humans by and large are terrible at acting according to rational self-interest, and a lot of the older economic models rely on that type of behavior in order to have predictive power.
But really, that doesn’t answer how eliminating a minimum wage would cause workers to earn more money when the only reason they make as much as they do is because the companies they work for would be prosecuted if they paid them any less.
How is setting the smallest amount of money a business can pay someone instituting poverty? If these businesses could pay less, they would. And since productivity is increasing, they’d hire fewer people, and pay them less, instead of hiring fewer people and paying them the same.
They’re starting to learn that the issue is more: each person’s perception of what is “rational self-interest” based on all the complex factors in their life at a specific time is going to be highly individualized.
