Shodan:*"Back to the living wage argument again, are we?
Tomorrow morning, the US government passes a law that the head of any household must be paid $25,000 per year. The following immediately results:
"*
Back to creating your own self-generated strawmen, are we?
Please find anyone who is advocating a government edict demanding a minimal salary of $25,000/year to the head of a household.
Please find any reputable study suggesting that a modest increase in the minimum wage–one that would gradually bring it up to 1960s standards–would result in massive unemployment. (Note: In the last thread, december tried and failed.)
Please refute (or even acknowledge) the argument I’ve repeatedly made in favor of payroll taxcuts and/or childcare subsidies.
Please comment on the fact that most work that can be exported to China, India, et. al., (both unskilled and increasingly skilled) already has been continues to be moved to such places even though there is hardly any living wage legislation in this country to speak of.
If you are unable or unwilling to do any of the latter, please, at the very least acknowledge that what you have been posting doesn’t constitute serious debate: to wit, you are staging a debate with yourself by positing preposterous propositions, and unsupported assertions, with no concrete connection to what anyone else is saying, and with little apparent understanding of what is going on in the world economy.
Can you possibly use your time and ours more fruitfully?
I would like to interrupt the diatribes to make a couple of proposals.
First repeal rent control and open space laws. This would let more lower cost housing be built, since rent is a huge part of the expense of the working poor it would help their cash flow.
Second -repeal farm subsidies. These artificially inflate the price of food and since the poor spend a higher percentage of their income on food it hits them the hardest.
Third -municipalities should adopt proven crime fighting methods such as New York’s comstat. This will allow businesses that cater to the poor to lower prices since shrinkage will be reduced.
Fourth - Lower taxes on cigarettes. Poor people are more likely to smoke and these taxes hit them the hardest.
Fifth - Abolish lotteries. Poor people play the lottery more, making this one of the most regressive taxes.
People should not think that poverty means that our economic system is broken. Poverty is that natural state of man. One hundred years ago about 90% of the population of this prosperous nation was under the poverty line. That we have come so far so quickly is a great tribute to our nation.
I am uncertain as to the thrust of your remarks, Shodan.
You have certainly devestated your ludicrous example by showing it to be, well, ludicrous.
But what is this in aid of?
The bolding of your last statement seems to imply you are in reference to a Universal Law of some kind, some immutable principle beyond our meager resources to alter. Rather on the order of “There will always be poverty, there’s nothing we can do, therefore there is nothing we should do.”
If your historical awareness is comprehensive, you will be aware that much the same arguments were made around the turn of the 20th Century in regards to child labor laws.
10-year old children were given early instruction in our Holy System. thier nimble fingers flying happily over thread spindles in cotton dust filled factories, thier tiny frames well suited to the smaller seams of coal mines.
And then along came the meddling do-gooders, whining about a child trading life expectancy for daily bread. Much the same arguments were mustered, it is immutable economic law, nothing can be done, etc. Hiring adult workers at twice the wage is economicly unsound, uncompetetive, industry will come crashing down.
And yet is was done. It was solemnly declared to be impossible, and it was done.
While it is comforting to be handed down the Truth with a capital T like this, I do not find the statements particularly constructive. Actually, I would like some clarification here.
Are you saying that it is simply a fact of life that we must accept that folks are doomed to lives of backbreaking labor, no savings, poor retirement prospects and in all likelihood no health insurance? Do you feel that there is nothing to be done about this?
Fair enough. Lets discard out of hand the notion of paying people a living wage. Mightn’t there be steps that can be taken to make it possible to live on the wage that they do earn?
Some thoughts:
[ul] Legislative
[li]Redefine the poverty level so that it is a more accurate view of reality. Use this figure in calculating eligibility for federally subsidized housing, healthcare, food stamps, and the like.[/li][li]Exclude many assets when calculating eligibility for these type of programs so that the family that does manage to scrape savings together is not punished for this by loosing the assistance that they need to survive.[/li][li]Reexamine zoning laws to encourage more diverse communities, rather than the process of gentrification that tends to displace folks from semi-affordable rentals.[/li] Social
[li]Discard the notion that this is a meritocracy, and that with enough hard work anyone can make it. This is, generally speaking, false and leads to the notion that it is ok to not do anything, because the folks that aren’t making it must be lazy.[/li][/ul]
Just as a few thoughts
“One hundred years ago about 90% of the population of this prosperous nation was under the poverty line.”
puddlegum, I agree with the spirit of your comments as well as with many of your specific proposals. I question the above assertion, though. I’m not famliar with data on US poverty levels c. 1900; but I am with British. At around the turn of the century approximately 1/3 of the population of Britian was living at a subsistence level (if they got sick or lost their jobs they didn’t eat; and their subsistence was pretty meager as well). Granted, this subsistence level was probably lower than what you might mean by “under the poverty line.” On the whole though, I think that Americans were somewhat better off than the their British counterparts.
All this by way of saying that I doubt the 90% figure but would certainly like to hear more about it if it’s based on something you’ve read.
Point of clarification: I am not advocating rioting or revolution. More, I am using this as an example to make a point.
While the L.A. riots that you use as an example were not constructive in the sense of redressing that particular wrong, I think that it is worth mentioning that it did cause folks to start asking tough question of the police force.
What I think that I am saying is that I can foresee a time in the not too distant future where this is the outlet that this particular injustice takes. I am not a history buff, but I seem to remember (dimly) that there was quite a few Riots/clashes that lead to the 40 hour work week back in the late 1800s or early 1900s (or it might have been limiting how many hours a day people could work).
Is there not then some way to avoid this, and actually improve the way in which people live?
I go sort of the opposite of Binary. In a capitalist society, entrepreneurship is the path to wealth. For that, laws and regulations should address nothing more than coercion and fraud since otherwise, entrepreneurs are not free to create wealth.
I agree with Binary that the work hard to get ahead thing is a myth, but only because it is misinterpreted. Working hard for Mr. Jones might not get you very far. But working hard for yourself, in a context of freedom from coercion, will get you as far as you can go.
One argument I can think of is that a laborer might be working more than one job, so making any individual employer responsible for meeting his basic living costs might not work. I think, though, that this is a good argument against some aspects of minimum-wage laws. If an employer doesn’t have to meet a minimum wage for a high-school senior, he could afford to pay a working adult or a single mother more.
Can anyone provide an example of a society that was able to wipe out poverty? Is there historic precedent, on a large scale, for eliminating (through non-violent means!), the lower/below-lower class?
Well. “the poor you will always have with you”, although the US has come closer than most to disproving that.
And I pulled the $25K per year out of the air. Not that it matters. Any “living wage” proposed that is greater than mimimum wage will tend to bring about the effects mentioned, among others.
The Universal Truth which some here have not been able to tease out of my post is that you cannot be smarter than the open market. The law of supply and demand is not subject to override. You can swap the costs around, hide them, blame them on other people, or get lucky and have the other factors inevitably operating in any complex economic system cover up for you.
Which is why Mandelstam’s objections are basically pointless. Whether we increase the mimimum wage and pass the costs of our ideas to employers, or increase subsidies for child care, which passes the cost of our ideas to employers, both wind up eventually on the bottom line. It may not pleasant, and it is certainly inconvenient, but it is nonetheless true.
Some folks, yes. There is not necessarily nothing that can be done, but no, we cannot eliminate poverty. The best thing to do is the greatest good for the greatest number. If some small fraction of the US lives in poverty, and the rest are doing OK - in many cases far better than that - this is preferable to most people being poor. This is particularly so, given that what is considered dire poverty in the US would be wealth beyond the dreams of avarice for 99% of human history.
Attempts like a “living wage” are likely, in my estimate, to have as many bad effects as good. It is very similar to the “comparable worth” fiasco of some years ago. It started, no doubt, with the worthiest of intentions. It quickly deteriorated into the usual bureaucratic nightmare, and has largely been abandoned. Certainly some librarians got pay raises, but considering the scope of the intentions behind the effort, we are probably fortunate that it got no further than it did.
Now let’s hold on just a minute there, cowboy!
You begin by claiming that you are abandoning the notion of a living wage. You then attempt to hide the same notion in a morass of government regulation and hope nobody notices the cost shifting.
Your zoning notion sounds a lot like rent control. Do you really claim that cities like New York, with such regulations, are better off in terms of affordable housing than those without? Can we say, cite?
And here we part company completely. The idea that no one ever makes it out of poverty except by the grace of big government programs is one so clearly false as to be self-refuting in the eyes of anyone born in the last fifty years or so.
If your idea were correct, those in poverty would tend to stay there. They don’t. Most poor people are no longer poor after five years (in the US - the Third World is obviously a different case. but I would argue that living wage notions would be as absurd there as anywhere). Shall I provide you a cite?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could pass a comprehensive block of laws, and make everything better? Yes, it would, which is why it gets tried from time to time. And yet poverty persists, and it persists most among those who seem to be evidencing certain kinds of behavior. By odd coincidence, those who manage to act like the middle class - graduate from high school, don’t have children you cannot support, go to work every day even if you don’t find it deeply fulfilling, save your money - tend to wind up in the middle class. Those who wait on the government to subsidize them into affluence wait, by and large, in vain.
You cannot do just one thing. This is a fundamental law of ecology, as well as of economics. The market reflects all the factors that make it up, and react to them. If you change any or all the factors, the market will react to them as well. If you pass a law affecting the market, it will react to that as well. But it doesn’t only react the way you want it to.
Government passes laws, and people react to them. Then the government passes laws to try to stop them from reacting in ways of which government disapproves. And people react again. So there are more laws. And more. And more.
Until the goverment is the de factor employer of practically everybody. And there are laws to cover practically everything, and more laws to be sure that everyone is obeying all the other laws, and laws to be sure that no one is thinking up ways to get around the laws, and so on.
Oh, really? Funny that I did all that (plus some college) except save money… which I couldn’t afford to do, even on higher than minimum wage… and I’ve always been financially poor.
Shodan, we must have some kind of disconnect going on because, as I see it, you are continually missing the point.
" And I pulled the $25K per year out of the air. Not that it matters. Any “living wage” proposed that is greater than mimimum wage will tend to bring about the effects mentioned, among others."
No–it does matter. Because we’re discussing poverty and my point was specifically that the minimum wage has lagged behind both inflation and productivity gains. The former means that low-income workers have effectively taken a paycut over the last 40 years or so. The latter means that the share that workers should have gotten of their increased productivity has gone elsewhere–probably to investor/owner profits.
You see, the thing about a minimum wage it has to change relative to other things. Just like the price of a Big Mac has changed since the 1960s, so the minimum wage has to change–and to the extent that it doesn’t workers take a paycut. So when I say that I think the minimum wage should be allowed to catch up with his 1960s-level, I mean just that. I’m not talking about an arbitrary figure; I’m not talking about a living wage calculated to produce a particular standard of living.
(As a matter of fact the minimum wage catch-up I’m talking about would not be a living wage–except perhaps in some very inexpensive places. But it would certainly help people; and it would only be giving workers what they deserve.)
The way you invoke the “minimum wage” above–as the figure above which no “living wage” should go–you seem to believe that a minimum wage is a figure that never fluctuates. Do you think that workers should always take a paycut relative to inflation? Do you think that wage earners should never get their share of increased productivity? If you do, you have a pretty strange idea of this “market” you keep invoking. That is you seem to think that workers should be subject to market forces, but not part of them.
I won’t say another word until I’m absolutely confident that you understand what I have so far said.
Brutus - briefly. Poverty is at significantly higher levels in the United States than in several other countries. I don’t have exact figures at hand and there are different ways of measuring poverty (relative poverty vs. absolute poverty). In terms of relative poverty the US is pretty far down the Western democracy list. In terms of absolute poverty I think it’s about #12 or so. If you do some digging around the Internet you’ll be able to find the figures for yourself.
In other words, even if one wants to insist that you can never eliminate all poverty from a society, it is easy enough to demonstrate that here in the US we can do much, much, much better.
So, Shodan, while I must commend you on the thoughtfulness of your post, there are some points on which I must disagree (particularly with your assessment of the scope of the problem).
I have been digging around some statistics sites (Whitehouse or Census bureau) and have found some interesting data (Cite and Cite).
Now, in looking some of these stats over, I will concede the point that the poverty level seems to be slowly dropping. Also, I am noticing that the rates at which people are graduating from High-School seem to be on the rise. However, I am not sure that this can be interpreted as some sort of a causal link. Moreover, if you look at the numbers, an estimated 11.8% of the population is below the poverty level. That is not, as you seem to be saying, some small fraction of the US population. That is an alarmingly large number (Though admittedly trending downwards).
That said, this link to the US Census Bureau is pegging the poverty threshold for a family of four at $18,267. This would seem to say that if one makes, say, 20K per year and was a member of a 4 person family that they could be defined as not poor. This seems patently absurd.
I make quite a bit more than that for a family of 2, and live a very meager subsistence level life. I suppose that it is possible that I somehow am just a wild statistical fluke and have horrendous budgeting skills, but tend to doubt it because literally all that I spend money on is survival related (food, shelter (to include utilities that make said shelter habitable), and clothing to protect us from the elements).
So, you talk about hiding or shifting costs. I would suggest that the scope of the problem is being hidden right now, and that there is a cost associated with doing such a poor job of looking out for our population that is also being hidden.
I think that a lot of this debate will tend to come down to the question of what exactly government is for. My thoughts are that (at its best) the government should act as a sort of referee, making sure that folks play fair (and by the way, it will take some convincing to talk me in to believing that charging all that the market will bear for a necessity such as housing is playing fair). I know that there has been a huge trend towards deregulation of everything of late, but I think that all of the recent scandals would tend to suggest that this is not very viable
When I was going to school in Berkeley the rent control their did not seem to be creating affordable housing. The way you got an apartment in Berkeley was to know the person that was leaving the apartment and talking to the land lord and basically taking over the lease.
There were absolutely no new apartment buildings in Berkeley. The apartments were rundown in comparison to the ones in neighboring cities. In the cities just neighboring Berkeley there were new apartments and these apartments could be rented without having a big knowing the right people. I don’t think the rent control in Berkeley created affordable housing.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Bay area neighboring cities are really administrative lines in a vast sea of urban space. I bring this up because you only had to travel a few blocks to be out of Berkeley and into the neighboring city it is not like a neighboring city to Denver is Colorado Springs.
I’m a Johnny-come lately here but want to pitch an observation that I read elsewhere.
A company that employes and relies on lower wage wage workers is not bearing the full cost of their employees but is passing them on to taxpayers. If I employ many adults for near minimum wage and provide no health insurance then what happens if they get sick? Taxpayers will have to pay. If my workers qualify for welfare/food stamps, I am passing on costs to taxpayers.
Is it unreasonable to expect businesses to pay the full costs of employing workers and not pass it on? This is a serious, open minded question of mine since I’m not sure what is ‘best’.
Interesting point, but I thnk that we’re probably better off the way we are now than requiring employers to take over every possible expense that an employee might have because the current system also covers those unemployed.
Binary,
I guess the question that we come right down to is, how do you define poverty? Food+water+shelter? Or more than that? Where do we draw the line? Nothing personal, but when you say that you’re barely living at a subsistence level what exactly to you mean? If you lost $5 of daily income (enough to buy what, 750 calories of food?), would you slowly begin to starve to death? Or are there actually things in your life that you don’t need to survive?
Do you have cable TV? Do you have a TV at all? A phone? A radio? A car? How old are your clothes? Do you own the computer that your typing on? Do you have some sort of health insurance? If you were struck by a car crossing the street today on your way to work, would the ambulance refuse to take you to the hospital? Have you been to a movie in the last month or two? If your hungry, can you eat more? Do you have a place to sleep in relative comfort? Do you have a sanitary, flushing, toilet?
These are things that most of the world survives without every day, but do you have any of them? So, again, how exactly do you define subsistence level?
threemae- you make a good point, that millions of people all over the world don’t have cable, runing water, or electricity.
but you know what? This is the 1st world. Running water, a fridge, and most of the ‘utilities’ are standard here.
I have a phone… this is considered a necessity by me, since I live away from my children, and need to communicate with them when they’re not at my house, and it enables me to make more money.
I do not have cable.
I rarely eat out these days.
We have 1 car, which is filled with cheap gas. it is necessary, as there is no buses to my girlfriends workplace, nor do the buses run when I am getting off work.
I tend to leave lights off in my house to the last possible moment.
Yes I can eat my fill… but my food is usually processed and unhealthy. Fresh, healthy food is more expensive. But I must eat, and Ramen is cheaper than broiled chicken breast.
I will never own my home, at this rate. I save money monthly, but twice it has been eliminated by emergencies.
Oddly enough, I make just enough money so that if I am in a carwreck, I will not qualify for Medi-Cal, and so will probably go bankrupt to avoid death.
Something must be done, I agree, but revolution is not the answer (most revolutionaries I’ve talked with have no idea what to put in place when they win, they just want to fight… idiots, on the whole).
I don’t think there is an easy answer. But I’m looking for one.
There seems to be a standard stance as regards poverty, generally delivered with the air of one who is pressed upon by the naive and the idealistic.
The first dogma is that poverty is intractable, it is apparently part of some natural order. “The poor are always with us” they like to quote, as if to imply some divine dictum. Nothing can truly be done, let’s not try.
Further, they assert, American poor people are really very well off indeed, being as they are not beset by cholera, malaria, and tin pot dicators. Our fellow citizen’s poverty is not real poverty, nothing need be done, let’s not try.
Well, if our people are so much better off, then there is that much less to do. The allegedly impossible task is largely complete, why shirk away now? About all the poor truly lack in America is housing and education, is this such a challenge to a wealthy people such as we? We can build a Hoover Dam, send men to the moon, yet a few decent apartments, books and schoolrooms is beyond us? Given how much money we spend every year on nothing more than loud, shiny crap?
