I don’t know how to answer your question without insulting you. Common sense does not require a cite. Neither of my parents advanced beyond HS. They lived through the depression so there wasn’t a politician to run and cry to because they couldn’t afford an “HMO”. I won’t bore with their life through the depression. My father built his first house by going to the library and learning how to form concrete, frame walls and do basic wiring. After he started the house he went to the bank for a loan. They said he couldn’t do it that way. He showed them the basement and his plans and he got the loan. They kept records of everything they spent money on and could tell you to the penny how much money they had in the bank. He drove junk cars that he kept going with tin cans and coat hangers and car pooled to work. Mom car pooled the kids to school when she had a car available. Our phone was a party line which we shared with other people.
My parents also did the unheard of thing of actually planning a family. No cell phones, cable TV, internet or HMO’s. We used TV trays for end tables and I still have the lamps that were on them as a reminder. Our funiture consisted of a couch, kitchen table, beds and dressers. The only luxury item we had for years was a TV and that was after the washer and dryer were purchased. They paid doctor bills with cash that they saved up for in advance. In short, they planned ahead. They purchased enough insurance to cover what they could not afford to lose. They did this on one income.
I could rattle on all day on how to succeed in a free market society. Ultimately it will come down to the fact that adults learn to take care of themselves because their parents teach them how.
America is my country! I have just as much a right to discuss my ideas for America’s future as anyone else. I think we are on the tail end of ongoing social progress right now, and I would like to see us catch up.
Right now, Americans do not have the quality of life that we could easily have. Our programs may be great for business, great for freedom, great for whatever, but when you get down to it, citizens of other industrialized countries enjoy a better quality of life than we do. There is no reason for working people to be hungry. There is no reason why we can’t all have access to health care. There is no reason for one person’s public education to be worth more than another’s.
There is no reason why an adult with 2 arms and legs can’t swing a hammer or drive a vehicle. Both pay way above minimum wage. The start-up cost for a roofer is a hammer, a ladder and a chalk-line. A CDL license is not a large expense, which can easily be earned many times over working part time jobs as a student in HS. I could do this all day. Lawn-care startup is a lawnmower and a spreader. Window cleaner needs a squeegee and a bucket. Flee market fruit seller needs a license and a weeks grocery money.
Health insurance is affordable for an individual starting out. Family health insurance will require advanced planning, as do all other expenses associated with parenthood.
A person’s educational needs are generally met by the level of skill available. If you’re a freekin genius then scholarships to the best schools are available. If not, the fancy school is wasted on you anyway. The better schools are better because they have higher standards.
My brother has a CDL and he’s struggling to make ends meet. Why? Because his trucking company is miserly and would rather hire a bunch of part-time drivers than full-timers. That way, they don’t have to pay benefits. He maybe works four or five days every ten weeks. He might as well be getting paid minimum wage. The only thing keeping him from quitting is the fact that he JUST left an actual minimum wage gig at Lowe’s. He’s hoping his company makes him full time. I am too.
Say everyone looking for work right now, even people with college degrees, follows your advice and goes looking for those above-MW blue-collar jobs you’ve just described. Let’s say only 50% of them are hired (because jobs are limited right now, and simply possessing two arms and legs isn’t enough to get hired by a construction company). What are the rest of these good Americans supposed to do? Well, Mickie Dees is hiring. Too bad you can’t pay rent for a family of four on Mickie Dees wages. Not unless you want to move to a slum and ditch the car. And shame on you for having kids five years ago when you could afford them!
You can perhaps scold a minimum-wage-earning individual for making the choices they did, but denigrating minimum wage earners as a group (by intimating that they are lazy or stupid and not cut out for anything better) is ridiculous since our economic system hinges on someone always being on the bottom. Everyone at the bottom could take college classes, learn vocational skills, and start swinging axes and hammers all day long but they would still be at the bottom as long as the niches above them are filled (not saying they are right now, but there certainly aren’t a bunch of vacant spots).
GO: * A better solution would still be to finance this program through tax and welfare methods that were somehow tied to work. It could either be as a wage subsidy paid by employers or a income supplement paid to workers on earned income.*
I’m not sure I see the difference, from a practical point of view, between a legally mandated “wage subsidy paid by employers” and a legally mandated minimum wage. As for the income supplement proposition, we do have that, of course, in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit. However, I think we’d find that a lot of taxpayers would strongly resent the idea of increasing the EITC enough to compensate for the drop in wages if we removed the federal wage floor. Overall, I think the MW is probably the least controversial mechanism we have for partially subsidizing low-wage work.
Magiver: *I don’t know how to answer your question without insulting you. Common sense does not require a cite. *
That’s not a very convincing argument, though. You’re asserting that the problem of the “working poor” is simply a matter of individual irresponsibility, and so it’s useless to try to find any policy solutions for it. I’m pointing out that the problem of the “working poor” seems to affect a large and rapidly growing percentage of the workforce, which indicates that there could be systemic causes that do require policy solutions.
I’m glad to hear that your parents in the pre-New-Economy era fought their way up from low-wage work to prosperity and taught their children to be financially responsible, and I think you have a right to be proud of them for it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we haven’t currently got a genuine, far-reaching problem here that goes beyond inspiring anecdotes about personal gumption.
Remember the old “lottery analogy” about going from “rags to riches”, to wit: Anybody can win the lottery. But it’s a statistical certainty that most people won’t win the lottery. Similarly, given the right mixture of character and luck, any poor person can become rich. But it’s a statistical certainty, as well as an economic necessity, that most poor people won’t become rich. (After all, how could we afford ordinary goods and services if all the poor workers—janitors, nurse’s aides, Wal*Mart greeters, etc.—received rich-people salaries? Impossible.)
That’s okay, though, because we don’t expect or require everybody to become rich. However, we do consider it reasonable to expect that everybody who works can at least make a decent living, with enough to pay the bills and not fall into debt. That’s a reasonable minimum level of prosperity that a good society should be able to provide to almost all its workers.
Now, if more and more of the working poor are finding even that minimum level impossible to achieve, I think that suggests that we’ve got a problem. I don’t think it’s adequate just to blame the problem solely on individual irresponsibility, either. If a sizeable—and growing—percentage of the full-time workforce is running itself ragged and still can’t make ends meet, it indicates that there’s something wrong with the system.
I hate getting into this discussion because it usually involves hurting someone’s feelings.
You didn’t specify what CDL license your brother has but I am in the freight business and I buy truckers all day long. The people I deal with are desparate for drivers. A good number of the drivers are foreigners and I know how much money they are making. If your brother hasn’t logged enough time to change companies then he needs to stick it out long enough to get accepted into a better fleet. It’s not that hard. A friend of mine at work is doing it on the side. He works in Accounting but wanted to hedge his bets against the company’s future (which turns out was a good move). I’m looking into doing the same thing.
I also have a buddy who was displaced out of the insurance industry (not just a job) and he’s working at Lowes. It’s not what he wants and he is certainly earning less than his white collar college degree skill level but he is making more than minimum wage. It is truly a “pay the bills job” and he will leave it as soon as something comes up he wants.
you completely misread my example of employement. If you want to make money with little or no skill than START YOUR OWN BUSINESS (reread my post). the same reason Social Security is sucking air is the same reason you can make money on your own. The workforce is retiring and the service industry is ripe for startup companies. I know more than one person who started a lawn mowing service to pick up some extra money and now does it full time because it pays more than their white collar job did.
Money earned is the result of providing a product or service someone wants. I’m working with a company that makes turbo-charger kits. Sound complicated? I’ve watched them start a new kit. They take steel tubing, cut and weld it to fit in a particular vehicle and then weld up a jig so they can reproduce it. Slap a turbo on it and it’s a kit. Except for some welding skills, there is virtually no skill involved in what they do beyond that of any shade-tree mechanic. What makes starting your own company up even easier is that you don’t need a storefront anymore. The internet provides access to the entire planet without so much as a front door. I know of 3 people who quite their jobs to sell stuff on eBay. They specialize in their area of interest. There is no startup cost to eBay at all. NONE. These people all started this as a money earning hobby and it grew beyond their “normal” jobs. I can go on like this for quit some time.
It’s certainly nice to get up in the morning, knock out 8 hrs of labor and not worry about anything beyond a paycheck. Life is not always going to hand you that option. Sometimes you have to put some effort in it.
I agreed with everything you said up to this point (with, of course, the understanding that I don’t agree with your solutions). Specifically, I agree that just because some people make enough money to survive does not mean that everyone will or even can. However, the reverse should also hold true. Just because lots of people are not making enough to live well, or are struggling to do so, does not mean that they cannot. That is, it does not mean that the system is broken.
As you know full well, opportunity is not the same as guarnateed results. Take a look into what you said in the previous paragraph.
Allow me to ask whether or not this can be said without several assumptions about which bills we are talking about. The US generates a “poverty level” based nominally on the idea that spending more than 1/3 of ones income on sufficient nutrition is below the poverty line. When you word it like you did, however, it is much more open ended.
pervert:Just because lots of people are not making enough to live well, or are struggling to do so, does not mean that they cannot. That is, it does not mean that the system is broken.
“Broken” is certainly a pretty strong term, and I would not apply it to the current state of the American capitalist economy. However, I do think it’s fair to say that the system has a serious problem, if a significant and increasing percentage of the full-time workforce is not earning enough to live on without sacrificing some basic necessities or accumulating debt.
It’s the “increasing” part of that statement that I find especially troubling. If more of the workforce is becoming the “working poor”, how would we explain that shift as something other than a systemic problem? How would a change like that be caused solely by poor planning and irresponsibility on the part of individuals? Have working-age Americans in recent years somehow been hit by a bizarre psychological epidemic of laziness and short-sightedness? Given the assumption that there are no problems with the system, then how do you explain these trends?
I would disagree that there are systemic causes that require policy changes because I don’t think a policy change will fix the problem. You can’t legislate a work ethic. The worst school systems (by grade results) are usually the most expensive per student. The students do not have the parental background to keep them on track. The sea-change requirements to turn a school around involve changing social structure. It is a challenge few schools have ever been able to meet. That, and only that, will break the chains of poverty because they are forged, link by link, by the actions of parents.
Magiver: On the other hand, there are other Western countries, most in fact, that do not seem to have the same sort of problems to nearly the same degree as we have them. So, the question becomes, “What might we learn from them?” And, yes, there may be some trade-offs involved. For example, it may be true that the GDP, which is closely correlated to average income, may lower in these countries. However, the median income may end up being higher…as is apparently true in Sweden in particular (and the income of the poorest segment there is apparently significantly higher).
And, as kimstu’s statistics showed, some of the tradeoffs that many people seem to believe are involved, in terms of unemployment for example, are not…or at least are less bad tradeoffs than people seem to naively believe.
There are also some ideas out there, as expressed in books like “The Winner-Take-All Society”, that we may be at a point where inequality is bad enough that we can actually have both more equality and higher efficiency. However, even if that is not the case, we still may be in a position where we might want to trade some amount of efficiency for less inequality.
Magiver:If you want to make money with little or no skill than START YOUR OWN BUSINESS […] The workforce is retiring and the service industry is ripe for startup companies.
But don’t oversell this possibility as a sure route to success. After all, it’s estimated that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of new businesses fail within their first three years. And even businesses that ultimately succeed often don’t turn a profit when they’re just starting out, making it especially difficult for an unemployed person with no money to be able to keep it going. (The examples you give, of people who are already supporting themselves adequately in “normal” jobs and gradually move full-time into their hobby/sideline of lawn-mowing or ebay-selling because they’re doing so well at it, aren’t quite comparable.)
Magiver:It’s certainly nice to get up in the morning, knock out 8 hrs of labor and not worry about anything beyond a paycheck. Life is not always going to hand you that option. Sometimes you have to put some effort in it.
That’s a rather strange way of putting it, IMO. I mean, most people would agree that qualifying for, landing, and doing a full-time job already counts as “putting some effort” into making a living. It also indicates a decent work ethic.
Nobody should expect that a full-time job will automatically make them rich, but it’s reasonable to expect that it will provide enough for a frugal but comfortable life. If an ever-growing number of workers are faithfully putting in that effort only to keep falling further behind, then I think we have a problem that we can’t just dismiss as a failure of “work ethic” or “parental background” at the individual level.
I am not going to challenge your premise that there are countries like Sweden where the median GNP is higher. I would suggest an inclusion of taxes AND purchasing power when making such comparisons. If I remember correctly Sweden’s housing costs are extremely high on top of a rather steep tax base. When you change from median income to median purchasing power.
The problem with living in a free society is that people are free to fail. What compounds that is the premise that it is ok to let a social failure raise children (even to the point of paying them to do it).
I’ve danced around the real problem and it is not wage inequity. Wages tend to follow intellectual worth. What is lacking in the United States is intelectual capital. Children from impoverished backgrounds are taught by their parents and through peer pressure to ignore their educational requirements.
The concept that we need low wage earners is elastic. If a person cannot be found to do the job then the job is upgraded, automated or done away with. If you look at the trend in retail it is to do without. There are national chains stores in my area that now have self checkout as the only method of purchase.
I personally prefer to have a cashier and will pay for the service. I also am the last of a dying breed that bases a purchase on where the product was made. I do not represent the purchasing demographics of the general public.
I don’t think it is possible to alter the purchasing decisions (through wage and price increases) to raise the level of purchasing power needed to remove people from the ranks of poverty. Poverty is the inability to buy goods and services. If wages increase relative to skill then prices will also increase. There is a zero net gain in purchasing power and the likely outcome will be a slowing of the economy.
I don’t know of many jobs that pay only minimum wage these days. Back in 1991, I worked for minimum wage doing unskilled labor in a factory. These days, the same kind of position will usually pay at least $2 over minimum. A friend of mine recently got a cashier job at a Wal-Mart that paid $9 an hour to start, and she had no relevant job experience (last time she had worked was over 8 years ago as a teenager at a fast food restaurant). I think the minimum wage freeze has demonstrated that wages will increase even if they aren’t forced to.
KimstuHow would a change like that be caused solely by poor planning and irresponsibility on the part of individuals?
This is really very simple. People simply spend too much money on things they do not need, as well as echewing long term planning of any sort. I have an anecdote to illustrate, and a statistic to demostrate what I am talking about. I have a cousin who just turned 21. He is making a very large amount of money ($7k a month)at a job which is temporary. He is living at home. Dispite being in this situation for the last 2 months, he is still living from paycheck to paycheck. He simply spends it as fast as he makes it.
The statistic I would like to bring up is the fact that alchohol and nicotine comsumption is much higher amongst poorer people than it is amongst less poor. Simply think about all of the things that large numbers of people do which they could do better and it is really not very hard to understand how the problem of increasing numbers of working poor could be due in large part to personal responsibility. Of course, I’m not claiming that this is proof of such a thing. And I not that Magiver’s posts have not proven it either. But it should not be too hard to understand that a very large number of people do very silly things even to the point of acting against their own rational best intersests. Just look at the last presidential election.
Kimstu*Have working-age Americans in recent years somehow been hit by a bizarre psychological epidemic of laziness and short-sightedness? *
I’m surprised that you do not see the possibility. You were the one I took much umbrige against once because you postulated that the presence of hard sell marketing alone constituted a deviation from free markets. I’m surprised that your assumption about individual’s lack of personal responsibity can be abandoned so easily.
Kimstu* However, I do think it’s fair to say that the system has a serious problem, if a significant and increasing percentage of the full-time workforce is not earning enough to live on without sacrificing some basic necessities or accumulating debt.*
Perhaps (although I doubt it. What if people are simply choosing to live that way). Regardless, I don’t think we can say people are having a hard time living at all. Again it comes down to definitions. You like to use terms like “not earning enough to live on” and “grinding poverty”. But what do you really mean by them? The current poverty threshold in the US for an individual under 65 in 2004 was something like $9,827. Meanwhile minimum wage is 5.15 an hour. Times 40 hours a week and 50 weeks gives us roughly 10,300 a year. That is not a lot of money, certainly but its not starvation or even grinding IMHO.
When you use terms like those, are you meaning something else?
My sample pool is limited, but the ten or so really poor peers are all college graduates without kids. Many of them majored in “useful” fields like computers or science. The job market just wasn’t there when they graduated. They don’t drive cars- even a buck fifty for the bus is too much for non essential trips, their clothes are used- right down to the shoes. they don’t party hard and they don’t own much of anything. Their idea of an extravegant day is going to Taco Bell and catching a matinee movie. They get excited when it’s time to buy new toothpaste, because it’s their only chance to indulge in some recreational shopping.
Which beats the poverty I was around as a little kid, when non-powdered milk and canned fruit was a once-a-month luxery.
What sort of evidence is that? You cousin isn’t poor, he’d darn rich with stupid spending habits. Poor is when you feel guilty every time you go to the grocery store because you are spending money you don’t have. Poor is when you’re not quite sure how you are going to make rent next month. Most poor people never get the chance to display if they have good spending habits or bad ones because they never get enough money to make non-neccesary choice with.
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The statistic I would like to bring up is the fact that alchohol and nicotine comsumption is much higher amongst poorer people than it is amongst less poor. [/qouote]
Rich people have better drugs to spend their money on. I doubt most perscription pill addicts are poor. Plus, the rich have resources to help them fight their addictions. I’m not just talking fancy detox facilities, but just the ability to buy the patch and take part in one of the countless “quit smoking” support groups every health insurance company runs is out of the reach of the poor. A habit can be stopped through sheer willpower, but addiction esculates it to a medical problem that calls for medical care.
The poor arn’t supermen. Nobody is doing everything they could concievably be doing and nobody’s choices can survive complete scrutiny. But let’s look at what the poor are doing- working. Don’t you think that working full-time (or as close to full time as you can get nowdays) should be enough to maintain a person? Of course you are never going to get rich flipping burgers, but don’t you think you should at least not have to worry too hard about eating?
Yeah, both rich and poor people do silly things. That doesn’t change the fact that working the best job you can reasonably get ought to provide a small but safe place to live and enough food to eat three meals a day.
Actually, I see firsthand a reduction in number and quality of jobs. Six years ago, they were recruiting college students at the beaches during spring break. Now new graduates are fighting hand-over-fist for service industry jobs and entry-level clerical work.
Additionally, more and more jobs are going part time because that allows for a more flexible and less committed labor force for less benefits. Instead of hiring one secretary, companies now hire two or three part-time ones. If they don’t have enough work for all of them, they just give them all less hours- it doesn’t hurt the company to do this, but it does make the poor workers unable to afford to live that week. Part time workers don’t have set schedules or a guarenteed number of hours, which makes their lives pretty hard to plan, but which allows the company to always work at full efficientcy. Companies like part-time workers because they would rather quit than complain or fight. And they don’t feel like they ought to get decent pay or any benefits.
In California, at least, the labor market is so glutted that they can afford to ask for years of qualification even for part time jobs making under ten dollars an hour (I gave a bunch of examples from Craig’s List in a recent thread). For every new college grad applying for a job, there is a dot-com refugee that has fifteen years experience. It’s crazy.
I’m telling you, not making enough money sucks ass. Imagine not ever having your own room. Imagine not having heat. Imagine hoping every day that the thrift store has shoes your size. Imagine walking to and from your stand-up-eight-hours jobs. Imagine going out with your friends and not being able to eat or drink with them. Imagine not being able to take the greyhound to visit your family more than a couple times a year. Imagine rationing cans of soup and cans of soda as big once-a-week treats.
It just sucks and sucks and keeps sucking and if you can keep your physical and mental health you are probably going to do everything you can to fight it.
Unless your jobs don’t add up to 40 hours a week, which is pretty likely. Or you live in CA, where sharing rent on a studio apartment is easily $600 a month. Or you drive a car- the average American household spent $600 a month on their car in 2001. Even a used vehicle costs $100 a month in maintance and repairs alone, much less gas and insurance. Health insurance is about $150 a month if you are lucky enough to get it through your employer. Or you owe $150 a month in student loan payments (thats what I pay, and I got a kick-ass financial aid deal.
You have taken some of my comments out of context. I am not trying to suggest that all poor people are irresponsible. I was only trying to suggest that the hypothoses is not unreasonable. Kimstu seems to dismiss it out of hand.
No, he’s not. He is making money at the moment, but as I indicated, that job will end in a couple months. My point was that it was entirely possible to be struggling to make ends meet without blaming the amount of money one earns.
But you see, this is a generalization for which I have not seen any evidence. I’m willing to believe that you and your 10 friends fall into this category. But the evidence I’ve seen of irresponsible spending habits in the population in general lead me to believe that it is very unlikely that “Most poor people … never get enough money to make non-necessary choices with.” That was certainly not the case when I was poor. It was not the case when my parents were poor. And it is not upheld by broad based data such as alcohol and tobacco consumption statistics.
I agree. And I did not mean to demean the status of an addiction. However, before tobacco or alcohol can become an addiction, it has to be a habbit. Unless the person was rich for a time, became adicted, and then became poor, we have to conclude that many people spend money on tobacco and alcohol dispite the fact that they are not necessary. I’m willing to exclude true addicts from this if you want.
Frankly, no. It depends very much on what you are working at. I’m sorry, but the “as close to full time as you can reasonably get nowadays” sounds like an ass covering phrase meaning “as long as its not too far away or too hard to do”.
Now, if you mean that a person has applied for every job he could concievably do within a couple hundred miles of his current residence (or within a shorter range of any area he could concievably afford with such a job) then I might agree with you.
But that is exactly what we are discussing. No, I think anyone who is very near the poverty line should be worrying quite a bit about eating. Especially about how they are going to eat next month. The measure of wealth that has always made sense to me is how long could you survive without your job. If you are not able to put food on the table from day to day, you need to do something different to change that.
And just for reference, the poverty line is based on the idea that 1/3 of it should be required for a balanced nutrition. There are plenty of problems with it, but basically this means that one would have to be earning less than 1/3 the poverty level in order to be anything like the starving grindingly poor we seem to be focusing on.
Well, again, define “reasonably able to get”. But as long as you mean something close to “do anything necessary to get” I can agree with the rest. Of course even that presupposes that we are not spending any significant amounts of money on non essentials. Which, was the point of what I wrote.
And I see first had companies who cannot find qualified personel to fill positions. The situation is not as bad as it was in the 90s, but there are still companies struggling to hire enough of the right people.
It also alters the minimum wage status of some positions. Consider that when you call for MW hikes.
And sometimes it does hurt the companies. I don’t know if you have ever been a secratary. But that jod is not menial by any means. You do not simply show up type the 3 or 4 letters you are given and then leave. Good secrataries have to know almost about their bosses business as the boss does. Highering temporary workers to rotate through such a position sounds like a very bad idea to me.
Well, don’t get me started on California. That’s for another thread.
Yes, I know very well. But I’m telling you that there are concrete things you can do to pull yourself out of such a situation.
Shall we really compare sob stories?
And imagine sharing that not-your-own-room with your child.
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Imagine not having heat.[/QUTOE]Well, Arizonian here so I’ll give you that one. But imagine not having air conditioning when the temperature is over 110 for several weeks in a row.
Or that your shoes will have to last because you can’t even afford the $3 thrift store shoes cost.
Imagine working two of them.
Hah! Going out with firends?! When? After the 2 day jobs? Or after the weekend job?
As if there were time to go even if you could afford the ticket.
Imagine looking through the couch cushions of your brother’s house in order to find enough change to afford a can of soup from the store.
And just to top things off, allow me to relate the wost one I can think of. Imagine having your dog put down because you know that you will never be able to afford the vet bills to save him. Then imagine imagining that even if it were one of your children you still would not be able to afford the bills.
You know what? It actually sucks even worse than you think. We are not even talking about being poor in some third world hellhole. Take the amount of wealth we are talking about, and move to someplace where the water is not safe to drink. Where the streets are not safe to travel. Being poor sucks in every way except one.
All choices. Really they are. I’m not saying they are irresponsible choices, but if we are going to discuss this issue we have to seperate the necessary from the unnecessary.
That depends on the vehicle and how you do the repairs. Also on how much you drive it.
Actually, you can get it for somehting like this without an employer. Depending on your health, age, and other statistics, obviously.
I did not have student loan payments. I paid for what college I attended myself. Although I did pay off my wife’s loan after we were married.
However bad your situation is, imagine it with another $300,000 debt owed to agressive collectors.
If you are really serious about discussing crushing poverty vs psuedo poverty, you have to be willing to elliminate things which are not necessary.
Sufficient nutrition to live.
Sufficient clothing and shelter to avoid death due to exposure.
Some amount of sanitation to avoid exagerated risks of disease.
Anyone able to afford anything more simply is not very “grindingly” poor. IMHO. I understand entirely that being unable to afford the drinks your friends are buying is depressing. But you have to understand that this is in your head. That is, it is merely your reaction to a situation. The fact that you have to buy cloths at the thrift store, or that you have to forgoe some outings is not defacto cause for depresion.
It might be if there were some force beyond your ability to effect keeping you from changing things. But there is not. I have been poor. I have been rich. The path between the two is not as mysterious or hard to travel as you might think. In either direction, BTW.
Employers only employ employees if it is profitable do so. If a particular job function is profitable when paying an employee $4/hour, but not at $6/hr and you raise the minimum wage in a similar fashion, the execution of that job function does not magically become profitable at the new cost structure. It becomes unprofitable. A job is thereby destroyed. Unemployment rates rise. $4/hr is surely meager wages, but I’d rather have $4/hr versus the alternative of $0/hr.
But that is a false choice. Just as there are the “starving” poor, there is profitable and there is profitable. If your hypothetical company earns $10 gross for every hour of a particular employee’s labor, it could theoretically still earn a profit by paying him a couple dollars more. If, at the same time, there is a large pool of unskilled workers willing to accept (or unable to refuse) $4 an hour for that work, the company will have no incentive to pay more.
Remember, the essential formula is supply AND demand. Just because a company could afford to pay $7 or $8 an hour does not mean they will.
Unfortunately for our side of the argument, there does not seem to be any large systematic lessening of the demand for labor when small increments in the minimum wage are enacted. Unless you have found a study showing this. Most of those I have seen seem to suggest that small increases as well as small differences between neighboring locations do not have much effect on employment.
I don’t want to get in to trading sob stories, I just think that “the poor are poor because they all wasted the money from their jobs on playstation games and don’t spend 15 hours a day looking for better jobs” to be a glib and frankly odd statement. We’re talking about people- real life people like you and me. They get sick, they get depressed, they get tired and hopeless, they fall in love and do dumb stuff. They arn’t mathmatical models that we can expect to fulfill every extreme of austerity and productiveness we can think of.
But they are working. What do you think working a full time job for a company that is turning a profit off your labor ought to provide you?
And I would agree with you. Point me to someone making such a statement and I will join you in lambasting them.
Precisely, exatly, no more and no less, than whatever you can get them to agree to pay you. I cannot imagine any other formulation that makes sense. Can you?
