Is $15 per hour really an unrealistically high rate of pay for minimum wage?

This thread on rent rates got me started crunching the numbers-
https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showt...0839843&page=2

I'm very familiar with the rent prices and general cost of living for DFW as I was born in the area and lived here for decades before spending a few years out of state. The change in prices over a short time frame is jarring.





I don't think that the lower spending on food is due to lower grocery or restaurant prices based on my years living in MI/visiting TX and seeing that the food prices in TX were notably and consistently higher.

https://www.bls.gov/regions/southwes...sfortworth.htm

I grabbed a paycheck calculator to see what the take home pay would look like for a single worker with no dependents making $15 per hour.

This one is the take home pay with pre-tax deductions for only health insurance and an HSA amount equal to the average deductible.



Where the amounts came from for health insurance/HSA:



https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/av...ge-in-2020.htm



This one is the take home pay if our theoretical employee put 6% of their gross into their 401K to take advantage of the employer match:





Full time employment per the government is 50 weeks per year so our hypothetical employee with zero dependents and no state income tax nets:

$22,850 annually or $439 weekly
w/no retirement savings

$21,250 annually or $409 weekly
w/6% invested for retirement

Our "work 'til I die" example is kicking $3950 a year into taxes/FICA and our bare bones investor pays $3750 into the system so they aren't exactly free riders.

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Originally Posted By lightsarefallin⏩

help my fuk I recall getting paid 7$ an hour to work evenings in a factory when I began working lmao

And?

I made $3.35 per hour at my first job in 1986. Around $15 as an executive assistant working for VPs roughly 2000-2002.

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Originally Posted By miscerForLulz⏩

yes

Originally Posted By Kev1972⏩

Yes.

I mean isn't it a little bit funny that a forum that considers $100K/$50 an hour to be poverty also will say that $15 is too much to pay people?

Originally Posted By MetroBrah⏩

The issue is inflation.Do we really expect to keep paying people $7.50/hr forever? Especially while the money printers continue to brrrr.This is another issue that is self-regulating though. Workers go where they can make the most money. Amazon is the captain now. Everyone else better automate tasks so they don't need workers or start a different business

A lot of businesses are trying their best to do so- either paying less than $15 and/or running staff levels so tight people are burning out and rage quitting.

Originally Posted By Anachron⏩

Was scrolling to post this.

Yes and no. It seems to me that expenses and wages have gotten so far out of alignment there are knock on effects taking place with suppressed demand for goods and services and an unusual number of people living in situations with insecure or insufficient housing which tends to lead to increased demand for social spending.

As far as the federal minimum wage goes I can see how a massive jump would be worst on the small businesses and businesses that require a lot of labor. I don't see any reason that it couldn't raise immediately to $10 and then increase annually up to $15 or better- whatever it needs to be for a single worker with no dependents to earn enough at a full time job that they don't need or qualify for government benefits.

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Originally Posted By Hutrapper⏩

Is it wrong to want the minimum wage lower so I do so much better comparatively?



Asking for a friend.

But it doesn't seem to be helping much right now, yeah? All the prices just keep going up anyway.

Here is a fun thought-

Taxpayer money spent on social safety net programs has been artificially holding down wages by subsidizing low wage employment. The ugliest examples are of mega corporations that pay their workers peanuts.

Dollar Tree CEO Michael Witynski—whoraked in around $11 million in total compensation last year—announced Tuesday that his company is raising prices to $1.25 at stores across the United States, pointing to the current "inflationary environment."

"Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits."
But observers weren't buying Witynski's explanation for the imminent price hike, which was publicized asDollar Tree reported $216.8 million in net profits for the third quarter of 2021.The 25% price increase is expected to take effect at Dollar Tree stores nationwide in early 2022.

"Dollar Tree made $1,230,000,000 in profits this year, gave its CEO $10,767,883, and pays workers as little as $8.32 an hour. Over 7,400 Dollar Tree employees are forced to rely on food stamps and Medicaid subsidized by U.S. taxpayers,"Warren Gunnels, majority staff director for Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders [I-Vt.], pointed out on Twitter.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...price-hike-125

As a taxpayer you are subsidizing multi-million dollar corporations and paying to keep your own wages stagnant.

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Originally Posted By Anachron⏩

Sounds to me the solution would be to stop subsidizing the low wage workers.

You could go that way, but there would be a lot of suffering, lots of homeless people and beggars in the streets.

That's why I advocate for a minimum wage that will support a single worker with no dependents without the need for government support.

Or, IOW, still subsidizing the single parents for the sake of their children, but NOT subsidizing the employers as much by having a legal minimum that will not support a single worker.

The wage examples I posted above aren't exactly going to be giving anyone a baller lifestyle- that's a shared housing/basic transportation and food kind of life.

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Originally Posted By Anachron⏩

There are no homeless people and beggars now?

Implying we do have homeless people and beggars.

Originally Posted By Anachron⏩

And the minimum wage will support a single worker with no dependents.

Really?

No health insurance or HSA [taxpayers] and no retirement savings [taxpayer...or a ditch, whatever]



$12,750 annually/ $1062 monthly

This is from a local homelessness/charity page with single room occupancy options in the area:



Minimum $600 a month for a single room in a charitable/institutional setting.

So if you can get into one you would have $462 for food/clothes/transportation.

Originally Posted By Anachron⏩

Won't support car payments and cell phones, but it does not make people homeless or hungry.

But in your first sentence you imply that we have homeless and beggars???

You invisible hand types need to at least consider the level of asymmetry in the current labor market where a relatively small number of corporations employ the majority of low wage workers.

The corporation has a responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits. This idea that there will be an equilibrium reached that doesn't lead to some number of people being worked to death or perishing from exposure or starvation is fairly foolish.

When authoritarian government regimes have had the power to use people as resources with no regard for their well being they have done it again and again.

When the Communists took over Russia, they imposed a collectivist philosophy where a human’s life belonged not to himself, but to the state. Farms were collectivized, with peasants being subjected to a new slavery where instead of being owned by the land or the lord, they were owned by the government.

Not only did the state own the lives of the people working the land, it owned everything the land produced. And when Stalin needed to sell food to pay for machine tools and weapons, government agents took every last bit of food, leaving the workers to starve to death.

Allowing massive multi-national corporations such power isn't likely to go any better.

Under Serfdom, many peasants were de-facto slaves.

“It was a condition ofdebt bondage and indentured servitudewith similarities to and differences from slavery, whichdeveloped during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.”

The main difference between being a serf and being a slave was that a slave could be bought and sold independently from the land, while a serf was bought and sold with the land.A serf was basically a slave who belonged to whoever owned the land. They could not leave the land where they belonged,and could not marry without the permission of the lord who owned the land.

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Too much power concentrated in too few hands tends to be ****e for everyone else. In a sense the concentration of wealth and ownership and this apparent merger [or takeover] with government is just expanding the "company store" planet wide.

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