“The inflation rate” :smack: Yeah, it’s exactly that simple.
This depends on how you calculate the value of the dollar. Versus commodities in the stock exchange and other indexes, or versus the price of goods and services that poor people are essentially required to purchase, and which represent a significant portion of their income.
2002 $1.31 actual price of gasoline **$1.72 **inflation-adjusted price of gasoline
2011 $3.48 actual price of gasoline $3.65 inflation-adjusted price of gasoline
That’s not an increase of 0.1%, and I’m sure you’re aware of that.
Here’s the latest low, it actually went back down to:
2015 $2.36 actual price of gasoline $2.36 inflation-adjusted.
The difference between $1.72 to $2.36 (let’s ignore all the years in between where people had to buy gasoline and the price was even higher, adjusted for inflation or not) is **not **equal to the difference between the minimum wage in those years.
I didn’t get a wage increase of 1/3rd, nor did I get a wage increase of 100% of my wages, to offset the value of my income versus the things I needed to spend money on.
So between 2002 and the present, the value of my income compared to gasoline got cut between half and a third. That’s compared to gasoline.
How about Education, that thing that allows minimum wage earners to get ahead? It’s not like everyone who works at McDonalds becomes the CEO. It’s a pyramid, most people stay at the bottom.
Here, straight from Forbes. I’m not even going to bother finding liberal sources. I’m going to get all my data from the same source whenever possible, to show you I’m not cherry-picking.
7%
7 percent is not the same as 0.1% is it? Or are those two values equal to you, D’Anconia?
Health care.
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/chrisconover/files/2012/12/healthprices.jpg
The price of health care has gone up 400% even adjusted for inflation, while wages have been stagnant.
And this is calculating for an “average hourly wage” of about** $19/hr. **
How are they calculating that average? But let’s assume for the sake of discussion their numbers are real, even though they’re a total fantasy for anyone who’s been in minimum-wage dominated industries for the past 20 years.
I’m not even going to bother quibbling with how they’re calculating wage averages.
I’m not even going to bother finding more neutral sources, or liberal cherry-picked sources.
It’s like when “Papa John” Schnatter complained how healthcare would cause the price of pizza to rise by 25 cents a pie.
I’m not even going to argue his numbers were biased. I’m going to argue from a standpoint of believing the numbers straight away, and pointing out how bullshit it is that they’d argue these numbers support their viewpoint, and how they undermine the arguments being made by the wealthy elites, without using a different set of data or pointing out problems with their methodology.
Using a term like “average” can mean median, mean, or range, in addition to other methods, and they can defend that idea because by mathematical definition, an average can be any of those things.
And who collects and reports the data? And how much of that data do we see, and what data do we not see?
If I’m a member of the wealthy elite and I’m going to frame an argument for the poor to buy, I’m going to cherry pick all my numbers and make certain the best possible argument is presented, and all the facts that don’t support my viewpoint, I’m going to ignore or not report, or distort.
But no, I’m not going to bother with any of this.
Let’s use their numbers. Let’s use the numbers which MOST favor the viewpoint of the wealthy elite, Forbes’ *own *audience, their readership, their contributors, their owners. THEIR NUMBERS.
Well, the young people, they don’t need to pay healthcare costs. So minimum wage workers are young people, right?
Not from Forbes, but the same source of information that Tim Worstall cited in the article I just linked in my previous posts, EPI says:
88 Percent of Workers Who Would Benefit From a Higher Minimum Wage Are Older Than 20, One Third Are Over 40
I think healthcare costs and frequency of needing healthcare services is higher for the older worker. But that’s not always the case either.
When someone plowed into the back of my car while I was at a stop light, while I was on the clock making deliveries working for Pizza Hut, and the accident was 100% not my fault because my car was not in motion and I was at a legal red light, I suffered a head injury which made me go to the hospital.
There, all I needed was to be checked to see if I had any internal bleeding in my brain, to make sure I didn’t fucking die.
You wanna take a **wild guess **how much that hospital stay cost me?
You wanna take a wild guess how much of that a minimum wage worker can afford to cover by buying personal health insurance on minimum wage or less than minimum wage? You wanna take a wild guess how much of my actual healthcare costs were offered to be paid by the insurance company of the at fault driver? You wanna take a wild guess how much of that was covered by my own employer? You wanna take a wild guess what happened when I looked for a lawyer to sue these people?
Here’s the bottom line. My employer covered zero percent of it. My wages don’t allow for personal health insurance. I don’t have the $200 a month to spend on that. That’s going towards auto insurance which I pay out of pocket despite working for a company that requires that I drive for them to be employed. The opposing party’s insurance company offered an amount less than what I was owed. Morgan & Morgan refused to even take my case, because there was no money in it for them, because it wasn’t a traumatic long-term injury. It was a single hospital bill, which they’d end up keeping half the value of even if they won, and it wasn’t enough for rich lawyer to be interested in, but it made a difference to me, because it was seven thousand dollars, representing over half of my income that year.
Now there are several issues at play here, but I’m going to focus on the dollar amount for an instance of healthcare that I needed as a healthy young adult, and compare it to my wages.
A minimum wage worker cannot afford 200 dollars a month for personal health care insurance. Period. They could buy a sketchy barely-covers-you policy which has a massive deductible, which guarantees you’re paying a thousand dollars a year and then several thousand if you’re ever injured or sick and need a hospital stay.
http://www.epi.org/files/2013/EPI-low-wage-workers-reality-8-28-2013-2-54-01.png.948
So look at the rising cost of healthcare over time. And let’s say you’re fit as a fiddle and lucky enough to never be injured on the job. What if you have a family to support? A child? An elderly, disabled relative? What if your shitty income has to help cover their medical costs, and you don’t have a choice in the matter?
A living wage is a wage that allows a person to reasonably live, even if they’re not spending thousands of dollars a year on frivolous things. It allows them to afford healthcare insurance and gasoline and allows them to save for an education or allows them to make payments on a student loan. A wage allows them to pay rent and food, your basic expenses.
Looked for Forbes source, couldn’t find one, used the very first source after googling “rising rent averages over time US”
This is the Wall Street Journal, and forgive me, but they’re in the same boat as fucking Forbes.
This is the wealthy elite using their OWN NUMBERS.
4.6% PER YEAR.
That’s not the same as 0.1%, now is it, D’Anconia?
Do you want me to continue? I’ve got lots more.
Let me know.