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.
As a fifty year old I would like to point out that I did not officially reach legal age (18) until the 1990’s. I am “older”. Who you mean are what we colloquially refer to as “old as fuck”.
You made me do maths that did NOT yield pleasant results, if you’re 50 you must’ve been born in like 1945 and I won’t hear any different!
As someone in my early 40s, I can confirm that 50 year olds were born almost 100 years ago. Right? …right??
the minimum wage should be enough to afford a house…like it was for boomers.
You can afford a 2 bedroom apartment now though. You just need to sleep in your car because you live 300 miles from work.
Don’t give them ideas. Speculators will sell you apartments that don’t exist betting most people can’t visit it anyway.
Sounds like living in an NFT. Non-Fungible Apartment?
Non fungible tenancy
Ohh, well played
Primary residence time shares, you say!?
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.
3 bed room houses were $86k in my town 5 years ago. No influx of people have come here, in fact less are moving here because the colleges are struggling, but housing proces have doubled.
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
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)
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?).
Spoilers: I live in Germany, not the US.
Is minimum wage being rent for a 2br/1ba actually the goal? Why?
I would argue, if you are single, then minimum wage should be enough so that you could afford to live close to where you work in a 1 bedroom apartment. And live comfortably - so that by the end of the month, you don’t have to count the change in your pocket. So that you can afford a healthy diet. Some socialising activities. Putting back something for the future.
If you have a kid, it should be enough to afford a two bedroom apartment, whilst you and your kid live comfortably. If you are a couple, one income should still be enough to afford that. If you have x kids, it should be enough to afford an x+1 bedroom apartment.
Why? Because no matter what you work, whether you are in service or fast food or in finance, you still put a significant amount of your daily time doing something you would not do for the sake of it. If you work full time (however this might be defined), no matter what you do, you contribute these hours to society, and this makes you deserving of a life worth living. And especially your kids. Your kids are kids and they have no control in what you work and what family they are born into. But they absolutely deserve to live a livable life. We all do. No matter what we do.
And we cannot all be finance attorneys. I’m not even going to start with the obvious aspects like necessary service work, nurses and other essential workers being underpaid, inequality and inequity, chances etc. I’ll just ask this - if a person is really simply not smart enough, if they don’t have what it takes to be successful, be it low IQ or mental problems or lack of qualities or whatever - are they not deserving of a life worth living? Why are we even debating this? Should you not be paid proportionally to the time you put in rather than to how much luck you had in Life Lottery?
I mean, I’m not necessarily an advocate of big apartments, let alone houses. I don’t really get the idea of every kid needing a room of their own. But as for now, this seems what society deems appropriate (here, you get problems with CPS if brother and sister of a certain age share a bedroom). Therefore, this should be made available - for everyone to the degree that is necessary and appropriate. (I also think sharing an apartment when you are single is a great thing actually, ecologically and socially - but that’s not the majority’s opinion so nevermind.) This seems to only work if we decouple the idea of income from daily necessities and expenses such as housing and food, but maybe others have better ideas.
It seems grotesque and absurd that a society would allow the question of whether or not to have kids - or how many kids to have - to become an economic one. Like, even for the most greedy capitalist assholes, what exactly is the plan when cheap labor cannot afford to have kids that will then provide cheap labor?
More of a sidenote:
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.
It is a sad logic only in the fact that you cannot choose. Where I live it is definitely not cheaper to stay at home. Being able to truly choose whether you want to work or raise your kid yourself (up to a certain age) or a combination of whatever percentage would be freedom. Being financially obliged to do either is shit.
If you stay at home with a baby or a toddler, you are putting less burden on an overloaded childcare system, and you are raising future adults to be healthy, happy, and, from an economic perspective, functioning. You are not exactly having a lot of free time. It is enjoyable and fullfilling but not for everyone (which is why outsourcing a part of it if you don’t want to do it 100% is great). You got to be able to handle tantrums and lose your autonomy and perform understimulating activities a lot. Being a stay at home parent, at least for little kids, is not easy. Hell you can’t even take a pee break unless they allow it (and when they allow it). You don’t have holidays or weekends or nights off. I can’t believe this kind of care work is still not financially compensated. And I can’t believe that people who want to do that, who want to have kids and stay at home with them and raise them for their first years, just have to pass on all of this because of money.
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.
Ok this took a turn. I was fearing you would go another direction. I mean, I don’t think we need to turn to literal cannibalism or start spending money on sending people to be dipped in Venus’s atmosphere, but I strongly believe that there needs to be a very low cap on how much money an individual can legally hold. And disowning is a necessary step.
I honestly would have no problem with my paycheck going to taxes like 90%. As long as this means I am provided with groceries, housing, necessities, transportation, healthcare and retirement. And as long as everyone else is provided the same. Imagine being like a child again, having pocket money that you can spend on whatever gadgets serve your interest, instead of having to save it for worse times or spend it on necessities.
I also believe that people would still pursue higher education and leading positions even if they would be paid more or less the same as a fast food job. It is just a much more comfortable life, I’ve been there and I’ve been there. Working as a cashier for 8 hours is exhausting. Waiting is exhausting. Sitting at your desk doing excel stuff for a meaningless project, talking to colleagues and taking endless coffee breaks is not exhausting. The strive would still exist, simply because no one wants to have a broken back by 35. And people like the sense of responsibility, of meaning and power and leadership, they like to learn and develop. At least most do.
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.
The bitter taste in your mouth is boot. Probably Hugo Boss or Versace.
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.
A two bedroom for minimum wage?! Hmmm suppose that’s only ridiculous if you think that little should not be allowed to live inside and ALSO eat for working at what should be a living wage
Either raise the minimum wage or restrict rents to meet it.
Minimum wage goes up with inflation with a 1932 basis and rent is restricted to 1/3rd of monthly wages at minimum wage with obvious exeptions for students and those on a fixed income for one bedroom apartments.
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.
So? Who cares if people have a financial incentive to not have kids. That have that advantage now, too.
Why is it a bad thing to pay people enough for two kids even if they choose not to have them? And why should taxes be paying for this shit when companies make plenty of money to cover the lot of it? That’s just silly.
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.
What gingeybook said, with the addendum, if there was an option to bring up minimum wage to allow that wage to rent a 2 bedroom i would totally vote for it over voting against it, because itd better than nothing for sure.
Then we’d have to call it “some leg room wage”
It’s the minimum wage, it’s supposed to be the minimum you need to survive. Conversely, you don’t need two bedrooms to survive
No, we call it the “minimum wage” because it’s the minimum to be legally paid
It’s meant to be a living wage, and in case that’s not clear enough for you
and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
quoted from FDR, the guy who got the initial minimum wage laws passed in the US
Average in the US for a 2 bedroom is $1317 per statista.
Triple that for a monthly income = $3951
x12 for annual = $47,412
/2080 for hourly full time = $22.79/hr
A 1 bedroom (or 2br with a $200/mo UBI) at $1100ish brings the minimum to $19ish.
A 2 bedroom but working 60hrs/week or using 50% of income on rent instead of 33% is around $15/hr.
Just trying to play around with the numbers to see what a real political proposal might look like. Feels great to meme a declaration, people start disagreeing when you start putting numbers to it.
You didn’t stutter but I’m not sure you understand cost of living differences.
I mean the minimum in minimum wage is meant to be the absolute minimum wage necessary to balance cost of living.
If cost of living goes up then so should the minimum wage.
What I understand the least is how businesses need to pay for resources to make their products yet for some reason human workers aren’t considered resources and therefore aren’t treated as part of the cost of owning a business.
If you can’t make a profit while paying a living wage looks like you don’t get to own that business ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The “minimum” in “minimum wage” literally means that nobody can pay you less.
It has no etymological relation to the cost of living.
Sure, if laws were based on semantics
I’m just saying a 2br apartment in NYC is a lot more than one in Nowhere, Kansas.
Cost of living in NY > Cost of living in Nowhere, Kansas
Minimum wage of NY > Minimum wage of Nowhere, Kansas
This has nothing to do with what minimum wage should afford
I don’t agree with OP. We shouldn’t be striving to get people to work minimum wage. The minimum should be minimum. 2 BR is not minimum.
Now I’m all for a Basic Minimum Income. And if you need 2 BR and your low paying job isn’t enough, the BMI should cover it.
But this idea that the lowest working class needs to receive “minimum wage” is false. They need to receive fair pay, not the minimum the company is required to give them.
Isn’t the whole point that the minimum wage should be a fair wage?
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.
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Yes. That’s literally what I am trying to say. In a capitalist system, it is not enough to increase wages because the system will automatically adjust. Billionaires in my area inadvertently proved that the best way to increase quality of life is by introducing heavily subsidized programs. GASP…socialism
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.
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Bro clearly doesn’t live in a collectivist society.
The cost of a 2 bedroom apartment always costs what someone working for minimum wage makes plus $100. Why? Because landlords don’t want people making minimum wage living at their apartments - never mind the (perceived)increased maintenance and crime - people working minimum wage are people that don’t have income security and more likely to miss payments or need to be evicted.
If you raise minimum wage, the price of rent just goes up. Now that isn’t a argument against raising it more that an argument against renting and an argument for housing reform, but that is a whole different post.
The cost of a 2 bedroom apartment always costs what someone working for minimum wage makes plus $100.
It doesn’t, though; it’s way more. You are so out-of-touch…
If you raise minimum wage, the price of rent just goes up
That’s not how that works. Landlords and property managers can ask for more, but it doesn’t mean they’ll get it. What would happen is people would have more money for literally everything but rent and the economy as a whole would improve. I don’t work for minimum wage, yet raising it would benefit me, along with everyone else. It hasn’t even come close to keeping pace with inflation.
They can ask for more, and they will, and someone will pay it. Because now everyone has more, and everyone still needs to live somewhere. A landlord for profit isnt going to suddenly want less profit for no reason other than to help everyone else out, or they wouldnt be a landlord for profit.
As someone who is currently living in a 2 bedroom apartment and has seen the price change through out the years, I think I am in touch with what it costs.
It ain’t the “market” that sets prices, it’s the owners. The owners set prices to fill up the apartments, sure, but they would rather it sit empty then rent it out to someone that would cost more money to evict and repair then they would pay in rent.
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.
The problem is these are full time jobs. Its not like you are putting in minimum effort.
Why is one roommate the minimum? Why not 10, or 20, or 50?
Define minimum…
You ever worked minimum wage jobs? Loads of them suck and many have to work harder than the better paid jobs.
What would you like the minimum standard of living to be?
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
And you can’t live in a single bedroom apartment?
I mean, I would understand if someone didn’t have enough to eat or a roof over their head. A meme about it would be understandable. But why 2 bedrooms? Personally, one is enough for me and I earn a good living.
And you can’t live in a lay down cubicle?
I mean, I would understand if someone didn’t have enough to eat or a roof over their head. A meme about it would be understandable. But why 1 bedroom? Personally, a rented cage in someone else’s room is enough for me and I earn a good living.
