That’s the way we’ve always counted it. If you have a better statistic, let’s see it.
I forgot to add that assistance is offered. However, I don’t know how much assistance that is. Either way, if it’s more than $20/week, I don’t think most MW earners are going to be able to afford it. And gawd help ya if you have more than one kid!
I don’t doubt that’s the way it’s always been counted. That doesn’t answer my question. How does that reflect on the state of the families of welfare-to-work MW earners? The employment numbers look great. The families look like shit.
They can’t. That’s why someone making MW shouldn’t have children. I wouldn’t. Would you?
Now, we can’t fault the children for that, and I think society has to take care of them. But is it too much for us to ask the mother (and the father ) not to have any more until they get better positioned financially?
That’s not the question I was responding to. If you have data concerning that issue, and you’d like to discuss it, then bring it in to this thread.
What happens when a working guy supports his family fine until his job is offshored, and then can’t find a job with near-equal pay? You may not believe it happens, but it does. Take a look at Detroit. The town is dead. People lose their homes. They can’t pay off their cars and credit cards, their credit rating goes in the toilet. Sure…the guy can work at the local gas station for $9/hour, but it’s not going to fix his life. Not even close.
I’m sure a lot of their price is determined by competition, so their competitors, who would also be bound by this wage, would have to raise their prices also. How much business would they lose by raising their prices fiteen cents (more profit!)? Since they are already more expensive than doing it yourself, I’d guess not much.
There are companies who might lose market share - ones whose competitors are already paying a living wage, and so would not be affected.
Honestly, Kalhoun, I’m happy to debate this topic with you, but everytime someone makes a certain proposal, you come back with some other gloom and doom scenario. I wasn’t talking about those type of people, OK? We’re not going to have one silver bullet that fixes poverty and unemployment for all time. There is nothing that ensures that any of us won’t lose our jobs and not find another one at “near equal pay”. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to sign onto some program that ensures that people will always be able to find another job at “near equal pay”. That’s why we have banks and savings accounts and whatever. If you lose your sweet paying job, you don’t qualify for a lifetime of welfare to pay off your boat and your big screen TV. Maybe you have to seel those things and start over. Life ain’t fair. Sorry.
That is the time when mature humans take a look at themselves, their family, and their situation, most likely sell their house, pack up their shit and move where they can survive for either the long or short-term. Auto workers have skills even if they are masked by the unions and there is work somewhere in the country for them at something substantially higher than $9 an hour. Mature adults with half an ounce of sense pack up and seek opportunity elsewhere everyday (In America? Get out!)
There is a very good chance that General Motors will not exist in 5 years so workers can either get out now or compete with the other shipwreck victims during the exodus later. The same thing happened with the oil industry in my home state of Louisiana during the 1980’s. You can’t coddle people to keep them in place until things get better. Things probably won’t get any better in specific industry and location so there is no need to postpone the inevitable.
Good people lose their jobs and their homes. People with common sense and a good work ethic figure out how to get a new job and a new house.
People like you pretend to be compassionate when it seems like you are trying to take on the role of a shepherd to a flock of brain damaged sheep. I think that most of those sheep are reasonably bright if you encourage them to be and will figure out a solution that fits them best.
Well, of course, its the fault of liberals and progressives, coddling the poor and interfering with the eugenics of social Darwinism.
In the same way that extreme animal rights activists will do everything to protect a deer population until harder times hit and they all starve to death.
I personally don’t see moving to find a new job at no matter what age to be an extreme thing to do. It is basically the American norm and expectation. I had to move to Boston with one day’s notice when graduate school didn’t work out because that was essentially as far as my gas money would take me. I got a temp job the next day for less money in total than we are talking about here and lived that way for a year including buying a $2 Chinese lunch special (no drink) and splitting it between lunch and dinner. I plugged away at improving my situation and got my first professional job a year later.
My coworkers, including ones with deep ties and families to support either move here to take the job or leave our company and move somewhere else to get a better one. What seems to be the extreme concern with that concept? It seems rather basic and mundane to me.
It’s a nice idea *if * you can sell your house. I don’t think it’s a seller’s market in Detroit right now. Why would anyone buy? There aren’t any jobs.
Well It’s a most unfortunate situation, but I think it’s pretty common knowledge that houses are an INVESTMENT, and the value of an investment at any point in time is of course a Random Walk (well, that’s the best model we currently have), so there’s really no one to blame but yourself for buying a house, is there?
If you are leaning up against the rail of the Titanic, you don’t start bitching that your ticket wasn’t worth the money. You try and figure out what you need to do.
There is a good chance that the Detroit based part of the U.S. auto industry is going to tank hard and never come back and things will get worse for the foreseeable future. If I lived in Michigan and worked in a job that was exclusively associated with the auto industry, I would realize that getting out now, no natter how unpleasant that seems, will be vastly better than waiting until things have bottomed out and the market in the rest of the country is flooded with people with similar skills. That is what wise people do and it certainly isn’t associated with just the auto industry. My field, IT, went through a similar transition a few years ago. Suddenly, people used to being aggressively recruited and highly paid found themselves without work or at much lower pay. Some moved, some changed careers, and some decided to adjust their lifestyle and make it work where they are. That type of thing is what rational adults do.
Or…on the flip side…instead of fast food restaurants raising their prices to pay several hundred thousand unskilled workers a bit more, they keep wages the same and billions and billions of people served spend that extra two billion dollars on something in the economy a bit more useful than Big Macs.
Ironically, if we were to discount actual Darwinism, we would be laughed off the board. And yet there are people here preaching what amounts to economic creationism.
Economic creationism. I love that term. I wonder if some of the more liberal economic thinkers will fight to give it equal weight with standard economics in our public schools.
So, there is a benign hand of Providence in this, then? Some overarching Creator who seperates out the blessed and the deserving from the lazy and the unskilled?
That is great! It bugs the crap out of me when those of us who are against wage controls are accused of lacking human compassion…I can assure everyone that, at least in my case, this could not be further from the truth. I seriously doubt that this describes others posting in this thread, either. I simply have never heard any kind of explanation for how these wage controls can work without driving up prices and causing jobs to be lost. It’s economic reality, and I have plenty of human compassion, but I am also a realist. I believe strongly that the more free the market, the more prosperity there is for the greatest number of people. I believe strongly that the problem of poverty can never be “solved” in the sense that there is some way to gaurantee that there are none among us who want for the basics of life. But I do believe that poverty can be mitigated to a great degree through free markets and striving for equality of opportunity. There will always be unfortunate people who have problems that prevent them from being able to support themselves, and these people must be cared for. But I believe that modern society, including the welfare system, has “made” more of these folks than nature ever did, through policies that discourage betterment of oneself and independence.
And a splendid witnessing of faith it is, too. But thats what it is, you do realize that, don’t you?
If someone would like to offer some convincing evidence that wage controls have the intended effect, I would be a most enthusiastic convert. I have seen plenty of convincing evidence to the contrary.