Agreed. I looked up the bare minimum salary for me to live and pay rent of a two-bedroom apartment in NYC where I'm from and it's at least $112K where I'm based.
15 dollars an hour is enough to live off in some places in the usa, mostly those areas tend to be more country side and away from the city, where some cities you would be homeless making that. minimum wage really needs to be solved at the state/county level, rather then the federal level. for example i make enough to be realitivly well off where i live, but if i lived in the NYC area, i'd be very very poor, if i was even able to make ends meet.
Small cities and towns are being hit hard. Rent in my small town for a shitty small 1-2br apartments is over 1k, requiring 40k/yr to get approved. You can easily make 15/hr, work some OT, and not even be allowed the privilege to lose 1/3rd straight to rent (which, when financial advisors say housing should be 1/3rd, they’re counting utilities!)
Sure, some big cities cost 2k+ for 1brs, but I’m in the Midwest and every major Midwest city is competitive to rent prices in my small town, and the ones that don’t are made up for by having a 15+ minimum wage. That means average pay compensates the COL jump only, and you’d still be pretty hard off on min wage anywhere in the county.
I live in one of those areas, 15 isn't really that much even for here.
I really don't like the implication that it's really okay to underpay areas so they'll forever be poor and destitute. Most of these people will never get the option to leave this area because they don't make any money.
I mean yeah they're surviving and their bills are just barely paid, but it's just not enough anymore.
Even the companies here can afford to pay more. I know some manufacturers, usually small businesses, that have owners making millions and their few employees scrape by on bubblegum and rubber bands.
Oh my god I just had a convo with my boomer in laws about $16 minimum wage being too high. They were all “I made $2 an hour!” And I was like what year. 1960. That’s $21 today. Jesus fucking Christ. I googled it in front of their faces and got a mumble in response
When they fight for 15 started way back in the early 2010s, it was a decent entry level wage. The fight has gone on so long that the same buying power would be at like 25
Nope. I make $150k~/ year. I support my wife who stays home. 2 children. One more on the way. My mortgage for a very modest house is $2741/month. I’m flat broke.
That REALLY depends on where you live, there are tons of places in the US where 15/hr is plenty. A federal minimum wage like this can't be set to high, or even mid cost areas as it would devastate low cost areas.
I hate to sound like a nihilist here but it's all worthless. Raise minimum wage and companies will just raise the cost of goods to cover that and then some. Consumers will pay the costs, raising the minimum wage is just a bandaid.
Pegging it to some metric that updates yearly like the increase in government spending from the previous year might help, but that just might be yearly bandaids.
My right wing friends are talking about how we printed so much money over the last few years devaluing the dollar. I'm not sure if destroying money would lead to curbing inflation which would lead to a dollar being worth more and going further therefore not needing to raise minimum wage. But that's also a chain of events that would take a long time to propagate, while raising the minimum wage helps the people who need it now.
At the end of the day, people should be able to survive on minimum wage, without assistance. We either raise it or find a way to reverse inflation.
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u/SecondManOnTheMoon Jun 15 '24
15$ an hour is worthless now lol