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hey now why’d you have to crop it so we don’t get to see how fucking old this tweet screencap is?
I found it this way
It’s been three or four days since we’ve seen this posted, so it was overdue.
Show me how you convince someone making $40k that someone making $400k: 1. isn’t rich. And 2 shares their class struggle.
The fact is they don’t and they’ll never see it that way.
You can say you’re fighting billionaires all you want but what ppl see is you’re trying to fight 350k makers which they could be some day.Tax brackets exist. Which means both the person making 40k and 400k were taxed the same on that first 40k they made. If you raised taxes on people making over 350k they would be taxed at the same rate as everyone else on all the money they make up to 350k, and only the money over 350k (50k) is taxed at the higher rates. 95% of the population does not fall in that 350+ a year grouping.
So your argument is that there are a few outlying cities where making 400k isn’t enough, but there is no city in the u.s. that you can’t find a place to stay for $5,000 a month…15% of their income. While many Americans are paying over 30% of their income to housing.
400k, you can cut costs in your budget and buy a $50,000 car within a year. 40k, you can cut costs and buy that car… Never.
There is a huge difference between someone making 400k/year and making $25 million/day, yeah. But if you think 95% of the population doesn’t deserve a chance to enjoy life because you someday might be taxed the same on your first 350k, and you may have to be taxed higher on the 12.5 percent of your income that you would be paying 100% of towards living quarters if you were were in the 40k group… I think it’s greedy.
“But you clearly deserve more than $15 an hour. What do you do, what do you deserve to earn, and why?”
Society needs Mandatory Service Worker Service. Like Mandatory Military Service, except you are required to spend a year working a full time minimum wage job with no outside financial support before you turn 25
doubt it would help, these people have no empathy
Don’t forget the I was treated like shit, thus today they don’t deserve better mentality.
… (yes)
But if you ask them if someone deserves a million dollars per hour for shitposting on Twitter they look at you like you just burned an effigy in their front lawn. Not the brightest bunch
The common argument for why 16 year olds flipping burgers shouldn’t make $15 / hr is that they don’t have the same expenses as an adult, so they don’t need that much, and it’s so fucking wild to me that they’d use that. Clearly what you need doesn’t factor into what people are paid in any other circumstance, otherwise the top 0.1% would be middle class, too. So why does it suddenly matter for that one specific demographic?
This is why fast food locations are closed during school hours obviously.
Dare I say it’s totally fucking Marxist and anti-American to suggest that people be paid for their labor based on financial need? This also makes boomers have a meltdown
I shitpost on Lemmy; what do I get?
A hard time?
Correct!
$15 is a start. How about $20 and adjusted to inflation yearly?
It’s actually more like $25-30 now since we’ve been having this bullshit “conversation” for so long.
You’re right, $23 is what I usually use and rounded, and that’s an old number probably based on my own experience of when the minimum was okay. Looking back, even your range may be too low, as production began to outpace wages in the early 70s, making a comparable matching minimum close to $40.
In the end it’s about a wage being livable, whatever that needs to be. And it probably shouldn’t be a per hour number, as a company forced to pay per hour an amount can easily just reduce hours, defeating the point. Some sort of universal basic income, so wages become a supplement and not slavery? We have to change somehow.
Minimum wage should have been $15 an hour 10 years ago.
If you think a job should exist, the people working that job should be paid enough to live comfortably.
You don’t get to look down on people flipping burgers and sneer that they should get a real job if you want McDonald’s to exist - you’re essentially saying people should be punished for delivering a service that you want - it’s sickening.
If you’ve ever been to a restaurant with a conservative, the way they treat servers like shit is a dead give-away of their political orientation. Conservatives hate working class people.
Do you go out much? Most people treat their servers well regardless of political affiliation. My home town is majority conservative and are all very respectful when eating out.
Ssshhhh! Stop contradicting their overwhelming bias!
Church people are notorious for being the worst patrons.
I worked a career in an almost exclusively conservative line of work after being raised in the red south. I base my assertion on many, many years of close observation, but I admit this is only anecdotal evidence. I’m glad to hear your experience is different.
Would you say your local conservatives also tip well, or do they tip like the vile, sub-human pieces of shit I have observed?
I was a server for years and I don’t know what political views my customers had directly, but my absolute favorite people to serve were tradesmen with their families (at least locally, tradesmen are often assumed to be conservative). They tended to be pretty relaxed and tip well. Those are historically union jobs, and I don’t know if the people working them still vote in favor of worker solidarity, but they still culturally support it, ime.
My least favorite people were also people who are often assumed to be conservative, for what it’s worth: families on their way home from church. They were nitpicky, required a lot of attention, and tipped like shit, plus they often tried to get things comped off their bills by complaining about something on their way out.
I’m drag’s experience, conservatives tip the best. America is falling into fascism, and Americans are the ones who leave massive tips. Civilized countries with leftist labour laws don’t have as much tipping, if any.
Charity is something capitalists invented to get out of paying taxes.
$15/ an hour ain’t shit anymore. $20+ should be minimum.
The “fight for 15” movement officially started in Nov 2012. CPI calculator says that’s $20.54 in today’s money. But we all know housing and groceries have gone up significantly faster than CPI, and mostly just because the people controlling the supply decided they wanted more money.
We should use a money supply where they can’t do that!
If you’re suggesting something like cryptocurrency or a return to the gold standard, I challenge you to explain how that would help in this situation.
In this situation our pay is getting cut every year, at a greater rate than minimum wage is going up.
Conservative: yes
Gross income, roughly for a 35-40h workweek$7.25? Woof. I made that back at a grocery store 20 years ago.
I’ll take €1,969 and look out on the Mediterranean.
List of European countries by minimum wage
Don’t forget cost of living. Monaco might not be the easiest city to find affordable housing.
It’s notable that the countries with no legal minimum wage are also those with the highest wages. That’s because these countries have replaced laws with collective agreements. This goes to show that united workers can create better results than politicians.
It’s a really unfortunate effect of minimum wage. It turns into maximum wage, because employers can point at a minimum wage and say “hey I already pay you 0.01€ more than minimum, go back to work and be thankful”, whereas union wages are based on constant negotiation and actual statistics of what is paid in the market.
I really don’t want my wage to be determined on country-wide politics. In my opinion, it’s much more logical to let each sector determine it for themselves. Especially in times like this where right wing parties are gaining influence due to immigration issues. Why would I have to take a pay cut, because a lot of old people are afraid of immigrants? It makes no sense. Issues like that make people vote against their own interest.
The best way to put a value on work is by letting the people in the sectors decide. Both sides of the table of course. But just not political.
(I do realize that union agreements are also political in that both employers and enployee unions are democratic, but at least it’s confined to that topic and to that sector.)
I agree that legislative parliaments shouldn’t determine minimum wages.
Minimum wages are a safeguard against certain forms of wage theft, IMO, because the biggest stick around acts as your compulsory union.
Voluntary unions should then collectively determine minimum wages in a separate body.
I do not agree that there should be sector-specific minimum wage alone as every human being has worth and thus their time as well. This does not exclude sector-specific negotiations.
Some of those 7.25s will technically be even lower, that’s the federal minimum that will apply to pretty much all jobs, but they still have it on the books that if they could, they’d fuck you over even harder. Georgia’s for instance is 5.15 which can come up in some niche circumstances, and some don’t even have a listed minimum
I think New Hampshire is taking “Live Free or Die” too literally
So… one approach you could take would be to say anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment. You know, New Deal kind of ethos for the modern era.
https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/united-states/?bedrooms=1
Ok, avg one bed rent ~= $1600 a month.
$1600 * 3 = $4800 (1/3 rent to income ratio)
$4800 / (40 hrs x 4 weeks) = $30 dollars an hour.
So yeah its actually worse than ‘We’ve been arguing about $15 for so long its more like $25’.
Nope. Its $30 an hour. $62,400 a year.
Sure would be cool if we did literally anything to _actually_make housing more affordable.
(BTW 60% of working individual Americans make less than this)
1/3 of your income for rent is higher than financial experts advise. You should try to keep it under 25%
True, but afaik, basically every place in the US has a functionally, if not outright legally mandated 3 to 1 income to rent ratio.
Occasionally some smaller or more charitable landlords may waive this, or there may be different rules for some specific affordable/elderly/disabled communities, but for the overwhelming number of places, 1 to 3 is either legally required or enforced via industry standard.
I agree anyone working a full time job should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment but minimum wage in 1940 was $624a year and an average apartment seemed to be $324 a year so to meet that same level of pay we would “only” need a minimum wage of 17.25. That’s still way more than the current minimum wage of 7.25 but not as high as $25/hr
Minimum wage in major cities is usually in the mid-twenties these days. The idea of a federal minimum wage is kind of silly, considering how different the cost of living is across the country. Living wages should be calculated and enforced at the city or county level.
Not just afford a one bedroom apartment. They should be able to do so and also afford to go to work. You can get housing for next to nothing in bumfuck nowhere, but if you can’t get to work while living there, then there’s no point.
And you just know this is going to be the conservative argument regarding the subject. Joe Random makes $18 an hour in New York City and they’ll argue that this is sufficient because you can rent a 1br studio in Kentucky with it.
Just a reminder that we’ve been trying to get the minimum wage to $15/hr for so long that if we kept up with inflation the minimum wage would be over $25/hr now. By the time $15/hr actually passes it’ll be less than half of what it should be.
And, federally, it’s still half that ($7.25). Cheers!
Maybe the movement should stop pushing for a number and just say you want a regulator who just increases minimum wage by inflation every year, as well as setting absolute minimum federal minimum wage up to a level where you can actually live.
But without asking for legislation that gives a regulator the authority to set minimum wages, even if you get $25/hr, you’ll just have to get the movement going again ever few years.
This is not a novel idea by me, it’s done all over the world.
I’m so fucking tired of hearing about a living wage.
I want a thriving wage! If that means that janitors and whoever the fuck conservatives want to shit on make $40-50 dollars and hour, so be it.
Wages have been so stagnant that I want a labor market and not a job market.
The whole concept of having to earn your right to keep on living is pretty wild
This is a pretty privileged statement. We’re not at a point in society where robots and machines can produce everything we need, which means people need to do it. Why would other people need to labor for your existence while you do nothing? Every creature on the planet labors in its own way to continue living, and humans are no exception.
My point was more that people have a fundamental right to live, but sure
What does that even mean? Of course you have a fundamental right to keep your life. That doesn’t mean you have the right to receive food and shelter without effort, when those things require effort to produce. Yet we do sometimes provide those things to people who don’t labor. They’re not very nice, and they don’t provide a life of abundance, but they are available to many people who wouldn’t have had those options at earlier points in history. It is a great advancement in our society that we can provide for the basic needs of people who aren’t capable of providing for themselves, either in whole, or in part. But if you’re capable of working, and providing for yourself, then you should meet that challenge with urgency, especially since the taxes from your labors contribute to the assistance for the incapable that I mentioned above. We may eventually reach a point where nobody needs to labor, but not in our lifetime.
We could already have been at that point if 99% of the actual value of our labor wasn’t stolen by the rich. But sure, I guess we can’t reach it with this attitude
Did you consider they mean you have to pay others to keep living on top of the living part which includes feeding/caring for yourself. You are born into a system where you have to do many things outside of it. Just the concept that all of the land was divided up by groups and claimed so the people born in those areas have to pay them, work for them, and be forced to go through their education systems is crazy. You can’t exactly choose to leave either, the land is all claimed by other systems that will have strict immigration policies and their own rules for life forced on you.
Freedom is long gone.
and be forced to go through their education systems is crazy
Education is a huge gift, and your education benefits not only you, but the society you live in. Why would you complain about receiving a free education, which allows you to live a richer, and fuller life?
Depends on the education. I don’t think those born in russia or North Korea are getting that “richer and fuller life”
