The only way that every job can pay a living wage is if the prices of a lot of things go up, in which case you’re back where you started as far as standard of living goes.
Another way is for “every job” to mean less jobs. Wal-mart can cut half their staff and double everyone’s pay. More likely you’ll just pay double what you do now for food.
Well, I think Lind is thinking mainly in terms of “status equality.” Like in Denmark – you can have a janitor living next door to a doctor, in a smaller house at a lower income, but equally a member of the neighborhood/community – and we used to have that here, but we don’t any more.
Edit: And by that I mean the idea that janitors and doctors used to live together in the same neighborhoods both owning houses. That strikes me as a Leave it to Beaver fantasy.
You get upset at people criticizing wikipedia, which is famously unreliable, but you get upset at people citing the work of someone from either the Cato or Heritage?
Would you mind explaining because that strikes me as jaw-droppingly hypocritical.
Another way for it to work is for everyone to have enough money to buy things, so the economy grows. That’s what’s wrong with the US economy right now, corporations are thriving on foreign sales and parking the money overseas, and hollowing out the middle class who have long been the engine that keeps the US economy strong.
Dude, Cato and the Heritage Institute are well known right wing think tanks, or to put it more accurately, propoganda mills. Getting your data from any institution where policy trumps data is a bad idea.
Sure, it’s possible for someone here (Canada) to live on minimum wage, so it could be possible in the USA, if they raised the minimum wage a bit and had a real universal health insurance system. “Living” is not a particularly close approximation of “middle class,” at least by modern standards. You can get by with shelter, food, and health care in a reasonably well run country while working for ten or twelve bucks an hour, but nobody is going to call it “middle class.”
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Like in Denmark – you can have a janitor living next door to a doctor, in a smaller house at a lower income, but equally a member of the neighborhood/community – and we used to have that here, but we don’t any more.
[/QUOTE]
What a fascinatingly anecdotal, vague, disconnected statement.
Sound in propositional logic means that the argument is valid–if the premises are true the conclusion must be true–and that the premises are indeed true.
There is no non-trivial but sound argument for that conclusion.
From what I’ve heard, and Canadian dopers feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but my understand is that the cost of living in Canada is significantly higher than the US.
Not by much, I wouldn’t think. Most sources suggest about 5-10%.
Like the USA, cost of living in Canada is heavily dependent upon where you are; urban is more expensive than rural, and some cities are pricier than others.
Canada isn’t even close to places like the UK or western Europe. I found the prices there flabbergasting. I don’t know how people afford it.
Wikipedia is at any rate more reliable than any blog on the Net. Its imperfections arise from open-source content, but there are mechanisms in place to correct errors and a lot of effort goes into it, and any article on which contributors persistently and strongly disagree is at any rate prominently flagged “NEUTRALITY DISPUTED,” and further talk is always invited. What it is, is a sort of constant rough fractal-iteration towards the Perfect Truth.
Wikipedia, not surprisingly, has a page on the issue. (Get Your Own Damn Cites.)
:rolleyes: That shit again?
Let’s see what a truly unbiased (save towards Reason) site like RationalWiki says: