thegreekdog wrote: PLAYER57832 wrote:Few will admit to that, but when you decide that its perfectly OK to pay someone only $7.50, though you know they cannot possibly rent an apartment or eat without subsidies for that.. it IS what you are saying. Worse, you are expecting the rest of society to pick up the tab.
I need to know how many people make $7.50 an hour. Further, I need to know, of those people, how many hours they work on a weekly basis at that particular job. I need to understand these things before I can get on a soapbox.
I have provided this data before and you've ignored. I've even provided data showing what the minimum amount a person living in Philadelphia must be paid to live (i.e. buy food, pay rent, pay for transportion, etc.). You've ignored that as well. I think that puts the onus on you at this point.
I don't know where you posted that information. If I did not answer it, I did not see it.. or maybe I found several other contradictory sources of information? I did counter Nightrikes "information" on compensation, suing average rent, etc. costs. (actually, I posted a range.. the rate here, the average US and rates I know in CA).
That said, knowing the exact numbers is sort of irrelevant to this, kind of a "red herring argument". Does it really matter if 2000 or 2,000,000 people are being abused, it is still wrong. In fact, if anything showing that fewere people actually work for the lowest wage really shows that the minimum needs to be increased even more, that the impact of that increase won't be as huge as some people project, since more people are there already.
thegreekdog wrote:No politician who is in favor of raising the minimum wage is thinking about a single mother of four making minimum wage and working 60 hours a week. They are thinking of union agreements where salary increases tie to minimum wage. Why? Because the former people don't exist in any great numbers.
I have never referred to single mothers of 4. In fact, they have the least to worry about in our current system, because their incomes will be shown as deceptively low, but exclude child support and many other types of aid they recieve. I don't believe single mothers should be treated any differently than married individuals.. maybe held to higher task, because they generally ARE getting more than just their wages and most of it goes uncounted for a lot of aid purposes, but married people have to count every penny as their wages. If I get into that issue, its usually from the other side.. the payers of support who are shown to be making a decent wage, but who in truth have to give away 1/2 their income or more. That is, they should support their kids, but counting that as the non-custodial parent's earnings instead of as the custodial parent's income skews a LOT of aid statistics. (talking about reporting and counting issues, not payment)
MY "soapbox" is people working 2 jobs, often married, who either are only able to get by due to aid they recieve or who make just a tad too much to get any aid. AND.. that number is a lot higher than you seem to believe.
For the pure minimum wage bit -- wikki puts the number of minimum wage earners at 4.9% of wage earners. That might not seem like that much, but note that anyone making even a penny more won't appear in that 4.9%. Also, many localities mandate more than a minimum wage..(Alaska sets their minimum at $0.50 over minimum wage, for example) so they would also be excluded from the above. BUT, given that the current minimum wage is so far below what it really takes people to live upon today, that point is rather moot.
This site here:
Says that one in four households is living on under $25,000 a year. They offer a good, but short discussion.
http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-doe ... e-numbers/gives a nice general discussion of average wages and income distribution.
one point.. the author is obviously in CA, so when he talks of living on $46,000 in CA... I would be quite happy to live off that here!
On that point, I will lay out a basic budget, (NOT my own.. we actually don't spend this much on most categories, but have some very significant debt on which we are paying over 28% interest). These are rough averages for our area, for a family of 4
Rent -- $500
garbage, sewage, water: $100
electric $50
Natural gas (budget plan) $120
Food $400
phone $50
Gasoline, clothing, etc. $200
Childcare, fulltime ($120 a week per child -- children under 11 must be supervised in PA), 480
Medical insurance (employer-subsidized) $400
TOTAL: 23000 a year + various withholdings.
I tentatively set withholdings at 10% , just to be simple.. you can put better figures into this.
So... that equals 25300 / 52 = 487 a week or $12.16 an hour.
That might not seem so bad. One person makes $12 or two average out to $6.00 an hour, BUT -- a lot of people will dispute my $400 a month for food (does depend on a lot of freebies, getting outdated stuff on extreme sales, etc.) I have not included a lot of costs, such as even co-payments for medical care, and my utility costs are pretty low.
A lot of other costs can vary a great deal. Our household spends a lot more on gasoline than many people becuase my husband is a firefighter, (we spend about $400 a month on average). A few people in this area can almost walk, but others have to drive 30 minutes or more.
BUT.. note that you can probably triple those in any big city. AND...many of the above are low, even for here.
PLAYER57832 wrote:This USED to be the case. Now the "product" most companies "sell" is stock profits and other kinds of "financial products". Ultimately, there are real products and services down there holding the system up, true.. but far, far, far too many people feel they have the right to siphon whatever they want off, leaving the actual workers with less than it takes them to live on. That is just not right.
What in the hell are you talking about? For companies that buy and sell financial products, the employees are (a) not making minimum wage and (b) perfectly happy with their salaries.[/quote]
LOL... I think you need to step outside your office and look at what is really happening. This discussion began over CEO salaries. My point is that worker compensation is too low, but CEO compensations keep rising in ways not tied to profits from products. CEO salaries are tied to things like stock profits, other types of profits more than to the basic product sold. Beyond that, in a general sense, most of the wealth in the nation is no longer tied to making a product except indirectly. It is tied far more to more esoteric financial products and ideas.
Just look at something like home ownership. There we are talking about what should be a "reall good", solid property, something tangible. It used to be that way. We got low rates on mortgages, in part because banks could always repossess the house and make their money back. That was in the past. The last debacle happened because the whole mortgage industry went from loaning people real money for real products to loaning money under essentially fictitious grounds over what property would have been truly worth on any real market. Few people cared becuase so many had vested interests in making a few bucks off the operations. As long as people made money, they chose not to challenge too much. People all over the world were investing in the US real estate market and making profits, so when things crashed it hit everyone.. not just a few here. Soo... now we have thousands of people left with mortgages exceeding the "real value" of their homes, some of whom took advantage and deserve consequences, but many of whom were either duped themselves into believing they could afford what they were getting and many others who legitimately should have been able to afford their homes, who would have been able to afford their homes if the system were more honestly based on real profits instead of fictional creations. Guess who is paying almost nothing??? The heads of the banks! Guess who is making what profits there are left in the system? The Banks! Guess who is paying for all this --- we ALL are, more in the municipalities with heavy foreclosure rates, but ultimately, we are all paying for the fact that mortgages were no longer tied to real and true housing costs in a real sense.
A similar debacle is happening with goods. I will fast forward through a lot of analysis and debate and say that the biggest issue facing our country right now is that we are losing our natural resources, particularly our farm lands and to a lesser extent our forests and wetlands. Those things are not just magically replaceable. There is no foreclosure sale to bring back a farm that was plowed under for a shopping mall.. no matter if that shopping mall fails. The building may rot and become an eyesore, but won't return to farmland without some very, very serious monetary input.. if at all. BUT... most people like yourself in positions to make somewhat real decisions about finances, financing and various rules are mostly utterly unaware that there even is a problem, never mind having the knowledge to fix or deal with these many issues. AND.. too many of you have been taught, like BBS that a bit of financial knowledge gives you the right to claim higher intelligence and more right to make decisions than those of us trained in other areas. It doesn't matter what I know.... most people will thumb your nose because its not to their liking. I don't have an economics degree, so I cannot possibly understand anything about how money is generated (and yes, you have actually tried to listen to a large extent). Except.. as you noted, money, ultimately does come from making and selling products. The whole system depends upon people eating and having food, basics and then the rest is from left over money. When the makers get a smaller and smaller percentage, then at some point the system breaks. When 99% of the people are supporting the wealth of 1% who hold 99% of the wealth, then the system is not just skewed, its broken.
The intangible result is people depend more and more on government aid, seem like they are "getting by" because we have a lot of fall backs in our society that keep people from truly reaching a real, ultimate bottom. Teh tangible result is that company after company fails and people in even worse off areas start to get really angry, resort to things like terrorism to get a tiny piece of the big pie they see others have.. and think most of the US has.