ObjectivityIncarnate

Short answer is: to incentivize investment/entrepreneurship etc., which is good for the economy as a whole.

Hell, I don’t even want to ban users guilty of piracy.

Yeah, if someone shoplifts from a store, the punishment/penalty should not involve confiscating the car they drove to the store, lol.

I realize that, and mainly considered the bottom of the range as a result; $18 is still a far cry from $12, after all.

Okay, but the point is - more bro.

And my point is that without even being able to say how much more, not only do you know when you’ve reached the goal, but to opponents you come off as greedy and entitled with “I don’t know, just gimme more bro”.

That shit is just not going to work, ever.

Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.

Assuming 1 childless worker, got a list of things here (would like to know more about how these numbers were arrived at, but I’ll take them at their word).

Food, medical, housing, transportation, civic (apparently this is recreation etc.) Internet/mobile, and “other” (saving?)

I looked up an area near me. They give annual values, but I, like most Americans I imagine, can relate more easily to monthly costs, so I divided everything by 12. So here’s what MIT says a “living wage” should pay for, per month:

Food: $406. That seems like a LOT for a single adult. My roommate and I spend less than this for the both of us and we buy groceries together, so I know how much our combined cost is.

Medical: $276. Can’t really comment in either direction about this, fact is that medical costs vary SO much from person to person, and even for the same person at different stages of life, that I’ll just give the benefit of the doubt that that’s the correct cost on average.

Housing: $1615. My rent is less than this, and I’m talking about the actual rent, not just the 50% of it I pay (as I said, roommate). I could see this being more or less accurate for my area for someone just moving in someplace, though.

Transportation: $897. What the fuck? If you have shitty credit AND you financed an expensive car for a shitty rate, then maybe you could get here, not that requires a series of bad decision making. NOBODY should be paying anything close to this a month for a car, even if you get gas weekly.

Civic: $251. That’s significant, $60+ every week? Doing/buying what?

Internet/mobile: $117. That sounds fine, assuming middle of the road Internet and standard mobile plan.

Other: $368. Well, what can you really say about “other”?

So, other than a few of those categories being WAY out of proportion imo, the biggest issue I see here is that MIT is giving different, separate “living wages” for 3 categories of people (1 alone, 2 with 1 working, and 2 with both working (why isn’t this just the first category doubled?)), and for 0 to 3 children. So, some issues I’m seeing:

1. It’s one thing to force a company to pay a worker more if they have a kid(s), and/or live with someone who doesn’t work, but you can’t force a company to hire these people. Considering that the value of the labor itself obviously does not increase based on those things, this seems like it’d obviously create massive direct (there’s likely some that’s indirect, but the fact is that your boss is not entitled to know anything about your living situation) incentive against hiring anyone other than single childless individuals.

2. Typically an employer is not even entitled to know such personal details about a worker/applicant in the first place. But if we put these into effect, they would have to, in order to know which category you fall into, which leads back into 1 above.

3. There is a LOT of work that does not generate nearly that amount of value (in the case above, around $27/hour assuming 40hr work week) for the business, but are things the business can’t function without. It’s easy to say “if you can’t afford to pay every single one of these positions at least this living wage, then you can’t afford to be in business”, but the fact is that this would place huge obstacles in the way of a small business getting up and running to any real degree. Megacorporations have pockets deep enough to eat the cost though, and so they’ll become even better at driving small business to extinction than they already are, and hasten us toward a society where they’re the only real game in town. And I shouldn’t have to list the reasons that an ‘employer monopoly’ is a REALLY bad state of affairs for the working population.

“Just increase the minimum wage to a living wage” is not the ‘duh, just do it’ obvious solution it’s made out to be.

The classic definition is the wage needed to cover the basic needs of the family including things like rent

Rent where? Rent costs vary wildly.

childcare

What sort of childcare, and how many children is it meant to support? Or do you get $X per child? And if so, is there a maximum number of children, where having more won’t get you more money?

transportation

Over what distance? And how, owned vehicle or public transportation? If owned vehicle, what kind of vehicle? Used/new? Price ranges for vehicles also vary wildly.

I would go one further and say that the family needs to not be living paycheque to paycheque.

That entails what amount of extra money? And what do you do about people who willfully choose to spend it instead of saving it? Are you aware that in the US, 1 in 4 of people earning $150k or more live paycheck to paycheck? Just because one has money to save doesn’t mean they’re going to do it.

go out once in a while

Again, far too vague. How often? And how much money does ‘going out’ cost? You’d have to figure both of those out, and multiply them by each other, to ensure this goal is met.

educate their children

Taxpayer-funded public school already covers this. Unless you feel everyone should be entitled to the cost of private schooling?

save and pay for university

University tuition is another massive variable, so you’d need to decide how much is given for tuition. Also, if someone does not go to college, do they not get that part of the money?

and advance themselves.

The vaguest criterion yet. It’s pretty much impossible to say if a given minimum wage satisfies ‘everyone can advance themselves’.

As anyone can see, this “classic” definition is still full of major holes, and not nearly complete enough to even conceptualize a goal such that progress toward it can even be measured. Just saying “living wage” over and over will never get anyone anywhere.

There are two types of loans: subsidized and subsidized.

🤔 (lol)

Student loan forgiveness is regressive by definition (those lucky enough to go to college are a minority that earns on average $0.5 to $1 million more over their lifetimes, than those who don’t), aren’t you against wealth transfers from poorer to richer?

There should be no profits, no bonuses, and no dividends until every worker (not employee, it doesn’t matter what your relationship with the company is if they benefit from your labour) is making at least a living wage with full benefits.

To get anywhere, you must define “living wage” concretely. You can use variables of course, but without at least a ‘formula’, “living wage” is just a meaningless, unachievable talking point. You at least have to know what you’re aiming at, to have any hope of achieving it–you’ll never get anywhere just saying “living wage”, because ‘enough to live on’ does not nearly have the same definition for everyone. So, what’s the baseline, in your view?

Example: ‘the living wage should be enough money to afford [list of things] with $X leftover for discretionary spending/saving.’

Uh, no, the primary reason inflation exists is so that there is an economy, lol.

If there was deflation, the ‘optimal’ thing to do with your extra cash would literally be to stuff it under a mattress.

Too much inflation is obviously bad, but deflation is also really bad. A tiny amount of inflation is optimal long-term.

Huh, according to Indeed, the range for Domino’s delivery drivers around me is $18-$25 an hour. How far over minimum wage is your $12?

The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system.

You’re making this sound like it’s something that was arbitrarily decided by powers that be, but the fact is that if there was deflation instead, the economy would come to a screeching halt, because it becomes more ‘optimal’ to hold onto cash under a mattress (since in deflation, it grows in value over time) instead of spending it on goods and services.

A tiny amount of inflation is best long-term, for the whole.

The not-so-subtle misogyny of equating adult women with children, depriving them of all agency, strikes yet again.

It’s not victim blaming because he’s not referring to the same women you are. Like it or not, there are plenty of women (no one is saying it’s all or most women, by the way) who will pursue rich men with the desire for a purely transactional “I’ll fuck you so I can have your wealthy lifestyle and/or a part of your fame.” They’re perfectly content with that arrangement, as are said men.

Johnny Depp’s girlfriends for decades have basically all been women in this category, even now that he’s way past his prime aesthetically. The women accusing Trump of sexual impropriety are, obviously, NOT in this category.

Women are not a hivemind–different types of them can exist in the same society, you know.

He was tried and found guilty of raping a woman.

That’s not true. He’s never been convicted of a sex crime. “Found liable” in a civil court and “found guilty” in a criminal court are VASTLY different, and require VASTLY different standards of evidence.

It’s important to be accurate.

In the US at least, we already pay more every year in welfare programs than we could afford even if we wealth taxed our “very richest” at literally 100%. Nearly $800 billion. Yearly. This is not a solution.

We as a country pay more than enough taxes already, period. It’s the government not spending it efficiently, and not being held accountable when it doesn’t.

As just one example, the US government already pays more per person for healthcare than any other nation on the planet. But how many health categories are we first place in? We put the most in, we should be getting the most out, right?

The majority just give enough to lessen their tax burden.

There is no amount of charity you can give that results in you having more money than if you hadn’t, Kramer.

My man I don’t think I give a shit where you think I belong.

show me some billionaires that never took advantage of anyone to get their billions

You can’t prove a negative, screwball. It’s literally impossible to prove “never took advantage of anyone” about anyone, billionaire or not.

Not that you aren’t almost certainly using an overbroad definition of ‘take advantage’, on top of it.

I’m down to change my view.

No, you aren’t. People who are don’t play these kinds of semantic games.

I just don’t see getting to a billion without someone being taken advantage of on the way though.

Just because you don’t understand doesn’t mean it’s false.