"If $10 is the right hourly wage why not $100?"

[alp227]

Seriously. Some right winger just posted that on a friend's facebook post. This is regarding a local ballot initiative to raise the city minimum wage.

My retort: "The point is, the min wage should be enough to satisfy both the worker and employer: so that in a reasonable time frame per week the worker can afford the basic necessities of life (rent, food, etc.) and the employer can maintain a profit and the business. Good luck living...on the current $8 wage without public assistance. Please name ONE first world country where the free market successfully set a livable minimum wage (that is, you can work the job for ~40 hr/wk and be able to afford basic necessities w/o welfare)..."

As a millennial who came of age during the GW Bush years I am disgusted with the shitty fallacious rhetoric of Fox News/talk radio noise pollution/Breitbart/The Blaze conservatives. What happened to the "reasonable conservatives" (as Thom Hartman says) like Barry Goldwater or William Buckley, who were intellectually sound enough to deserve respect even if we didn't agree with them politically. Seems that David Frum is the only right winger I know whose opinion is even worth reading.

(edit) The RWer responded:

Entry level positions were never expected to be "the living wage". It's entry level for a reason. Unskilled, low skilled=entry level....Again why not make it $20/hr? $30/hr?

And so, wage goes up, costs go up (rent, food living necessities) Rinse-Repeat

My response:

Even without an increase in min wage, other externalities cause costs of commodities, housing, etc. to rise. And so if young people just entering the workforce can't really live on the minimum wage, tough luck, just be a beggar or malnourished?

[George Katona]

1. Hah,

you got got 'em.

[former-republican]

2. fucking bullshit

This country was built on entry level positions.

Tell him what the hell does he think most factory jobs were. How about laborers jobs , steel workers . These were the jobs that afforded a family to buy a home and live a middle class life.

It wasn't fucking high tech jobs , fricking douche bag.

[hfojvt]

3. I can live on $8 an hour

but I don't live in San Jose.

In fact, I don't even know where it is, or how to get there.

[Hugabear]

4. You can?

How can you afford to pay for rent/mortgage, food, transportation, and other basic necessities on just $8 an hour?

Maybe if you're single...with no kids...and living at home or with roommates in a cheap apartment. But other than that, I don't see how that would be possible anywhere

[Kaleva]

7. I live comfortably on a just under $1200 a month

But I'm on full disability, have no vehicle because I can't afford one, and the house I live in which I bought for $24k 12 years ago is paid for and thus I have no mortgage payment.

Of that $1200, $99 is automatically deducted for my Medicare premium and it includes the $16 a month I get in food stamps.

[hfojvt]

8. $8 an hour would be about $16,000 a year

the poverty threshholds were

2007 - $10,787
2008 - $11,201
2009 - $11,161
2010 - $11,344
2011 - $11,702

and my income in those years as a percent of the poverty threshhold

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002625762

2007 - 104%
2008 - 113%
2009 - 130%
2010 - 116%

So, my income for 2009 was $14,509. For 2007 it was $11,202 - about $5.60 an hour for full time work.

Fortunately, I was not working full time.

I am single, with no kids, but I have three dogs. I own my own home, now free and clear. So that helps, but house payments, even when I had them, are much lower than rent. They were about $225 a month plus $75 a month for insurance. My neighbor rents a much smaller house with a much smaller yard for $450 (or was it $550 a month - and he has no home equity).

I have lots of what I consider to be unnecessary expenses. Besides the three dogs, I have hgih speed internet, a subscription to ancestry.com, some magazine subscriptions - Nation, Progressive and Mother Jones (although I have dropped the first two just recently), it costs me over $500 a year to be a Kiwanian which I have now been for ten years since May. I even bought a 1993 Tempo in March 2009 and put $500 in my IRA in 2007 (and perhaps some in a Roth IRA too - although some of that money comes from past savings rather than current income, when I worked full time from 2004 - Oct 2006, I not only paid my house off, but saved some money too, albeit not as much as I wanted). I drink way too much pop too.

But most of my transportation is by bicycle, and work is less than a mile away.

I don't know. It is not that hard. Other than not having a love life, I do not feel deprived. I even sorta regret switching back to full time work. Of course, deprivation is a relative thing. Because I am fighting with the gas company, I am delaying turning on the gas, hopefully until after Thanksgiving. So, it does get kinda cold. Not today though, it got up to 70, so I could open windows and warm up the house.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. Dionne Warwick didn't know how to get to San Jose, either

And it was her hometown

On a more serious note, after withholding taxes, $8/hour would likely be around $7 net, X 40 = $280 take-home pay per week, or $1120+ per month. In my home town in Arkansas, it would be possible, I suppose, for a young single person to live on that: $350/mo for a cheapie cheap apartment, $200/mo food budget, $100/mo for utilities, $300/mo for car and associated expenses, $170/mo for other expenses/savings.

[hfojvt]

9. actually it would be $1213 per month

$280 * 52/12.

That seems like a lot to pay for a car. Mine has been fully paid for since perhaps June 2009. It only cost $3500. Liability insurance is about $320 a year. Tags about $100. So $35 a month. I don't do that much driving, taking my bicycle to work most of the time, and also to the store, etc.

OTOH, $100 a month is pretty low for utilities. In hot summer months, I have to pay almost that much just for electric and probably more than that for gas in cold winter months. And trash-water-sewer is $35 a month at minimum.

I am not sure how much I spend on food. I tracked it once, and it was more than I expected, but I was not doing inventory either.

But that was the song I was alluding to.

[Art_from_Ark]

10. My calculations assumed the following

There would probably be working days of no work (and thus no pay because of minimum wage job); the car includes payments, gas, oil, maintenance, tags, insurance and incidentals; the utilities are based on what my family member pays on average in a cheapie apartment. Food was calculated at less than $7/day, which is about what I pay for grocery store/farmers market food when I am back in town.

[PD Turk]

5. What does this dipshit do for a living?

I'd like to ask him if he lost his job today and couldn't get another like it, perhaps all the jobs in his field move to China or he gets automated out of a job, what would he do? He's probably trained in a specific field and if all those jobs are all of a sudden gone, where is he then? You guessed it, back at "entry level"

In this day and age it's not just young people that wind up in entry level jobs, we are all on danger of winding up back at the starting gate. There's no justification for letting workers who have put forth the effort to learn a trade or profession and gained experience starve over "market conditions".

If the big capitalistas want to play god with the livelihoods of the working class they should learn that there's a price to be paid for wielding such a privilege. Yeah I said it, "privilege". Capitalism is a privilege, not a right, and I think it's about time the big shots were reminded of that. They've been using it to abuse us for far too long.

[quaker bill]

11. Bottom line

If the employer does not make up the difference, we (the taxpayers) do. A major chunk of the people working at places like Wal Mart qualify for food stamps. They also get subsidized housing, free or subsidized healthcare, and various tax breaks to attempt to make up the difference between their pay and mere abject poverty.

Now, you can do this a few of ways. You can continue to subsidize these businesses with an allowance for low wages and pick up the difference on the government credit card, you can tax the businesses run the money through the government bureaucracy and hand it out in food stamps, medicaid, covering the costs of free public clinics, reimbursement for uncompensated care, and block grants to rich developers to make subsidized housing, or you can simply require the employer to pay it to the workers and let the workers make their own choices on how to spend it. Looked at realistically, a living wage is the actual "smaller government" option. This is given, of course, that you think poor, sick, and hungry kids is a bad thing....