You can afford a 2 bedroom apartment now though. You just need to sleep in your car because you live 300 miles from work.
Don’t give them ideas. Speculators will sell you apartments that don’t exist betting most people can’t visit it anyway.
That is one good thing that WFH did. I know several people who moved from LA to our middle of nowhere town where a nice 3br house is under $150k.
Damn bro, that’s actually pretty inexpensive. Do you have fiber out there, or heck cable? Because that’s… That’s some pretty cheap housing.
Yup, they’re actually installing FTTC in my neighborhood now.
The only drawback is that it’s rural Texas.
But, if enough liberals move here for affordable housing…
You didn’t stutter but I’m not sure you understand cost of living differences.
I mean the minimum in minimum wage is meant to be the absolute minimum wage necessary to balance cost of living.
If cost of living goes up then so should the minimum wage.
What I understand the least is how businesses need to pay for resources to make their products yet for some reason human workers aren’t considered resources and therefore aren’t treated as part of the cost of owning a business.
If you can’t make a profit while paying a living wage looks like you don’t get to own that business ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m just saying a 2br apartment in NYC is a lot more than one in Nowhere, Kansas.
Cost of living in NY > Cost of living in Nowhere, Kansas
Minimum wage of NY > Minimum wage of Nowhere, Kansas
This has nothing to do with what minimum wage should afford
I don’t agree with OP. We shouldn’t be striving to get people to work minimum wage. The minimum should be minimum. 2 BR is not minimum.
Now I’m all for a Basic Minimum Income. And if you need 2 BR and your low paying job isn’t enough, the BMI should cover it.
But this idea that the lowest working class needs to receive “minimum wage” is false. They need to receive fair pay, not the minimum the company is required to give them.
The “minimum” in “minimum wage” literally means that nobody can pay you less.
It has no etymological relation to the cost of living.
Because the ruling class destroyed working class solidarity and gave everyone anxiety disorders so no one has the chutzpah to go to their boss and negotiate higher pay. Your boss can negotiate prices with suppliers because that’s the established culture. Everything, and i mean everything, in this world is negotiable if you understand what leverage each party possesses.
Genuine question:
Is minimum wage being rent for a 2br/1ba actually the goal? Why?
I assume the idea is to be able to support a family and the sad logic that it often comes out “cheaper” to have one parent work and one stay at home rather than try to afford daycare.
But rent is just a drop in the bucket when you are raising a kid. Which gets back into the mess of how you can afford to have a family on minimum wage.
If the idea is just cost of living then the answer is actually a one bedroom (which would also, theoretically, help with housing shortages). If the idea is to be able to have a family then it needs to be a whole lot higher than a two bedroom (unless you work in NY and commute from one of the last remaining cheap parts of Jersey, I guess?).
I think the idea of the meme is that this should be the bare minimum starting point from which we begin to negotiate higher, via our elected representatives who should be fighting for meaningful improvements to our lives as opposed to increased shareholder value for their donors.
This is saying that minimum wage should be enough to afford a 2br apartment. If all your money goes to rent, you can’t afford it.
Yeah, ideally rent should be around 1/3rd of your income. In my town, a conservative 2br 1ba apt is gonna cost you about $2000. That means minimum wage would have to be around $34.
Alternatively, with our minimum wage currently at $15.45, that means a two bedroom apartment would have to be priced below $900.
Does min wage even support a studio apartment and like other basic needs?
This was more than a decade ago for me. But I worked 2 jobs doing fast food, lived with four roommates, and wasn’t able to contribute to my IRA, go on vacation or have much in savings. And where I could have gotten a studio apartment, then I’d downgrade to eating ramen.
I get where you’re getting at since it’s a minimum standard of living. Two bedrooms basically means parents in one room, 1-2 kids in another. With two children being the default. Once you get to three or more, or for people who don’t want mixed gender siblings in the same room/heavy age differences, then the two bedroom becomes the three bedroom.
I definitely err on your side of the logic though. That is technically minimum. In reality, there’s enough money for that three bedroom, the rich just hoarde it all. Most landlords got nothing to do with that lol.
I am a lot more skeptical of how high a “minimum wage” could even be considering the further automation of even “skilled” fields at this point. Which is why I am a strong advocate for Universal Basic Income to decouple survival from labor.
But if you are fighting the minimum wage fight: At least fight for something that would actually cover cost of living.
Spoilers: I live in Germany, not the US.
Is minimum wage being rent for a 2br/1ba actually the goal? Why?
I would argue, if you are single, then minimum wage should be enough so that you could afford to live close to where you work in a 1 bedroom apartment. And live comfortably - so that by the end of the month, you don’t have to count the change in your pocket. So that you can afford a healthy diet. Some socialising activities. Putting back something for the future.
If you have a kid, it should be enough to afford a two bedroom apartment, whilst you and your kid live comfortably. If you are a couple, one income should still be enough to afford that. If you have x kids, it should be enough to afford an x+1 bedroom apartment.
Why? Because no matter what you work, whether you are in service or fast food or in finance, you still put a significant amount of your daily time doing something you would not do for the sake of it. If you work full time (however this might be defined), no matter what you do, you contribute these hours to society, and this makes you deserving of a life worth living. And especially your kids. Your kids are kids and they have no control in what you work and what family they are born into. But they absolutely deserve to live a livable life. We all do. No matter what we do.
And we cannot all be finance attorneys. I’m not even going to start with the obvious aspects like necessary service work, nurses and other essential workers being underpaid, inequality and inequity, chances etc. I’ll just ask this - if a person is really simply not smart enough, if they don’t have what it takes to be successful, be it low IQ or mental problems or lack of qualities or whatever - are they not deserving of a life worth living? Why are we even debating this? Should you not be paid proportionally to the time you put in rather than to how much luck you had in Life Lottery?
I mean, I’m not necessarily an advocate of big apartments, let alone houses. I don’t really get the idea of every kid needing a room of their own. But as for now, this seems what society deems appropriate (here, you get problems with CPS if brother and sister of a certain age share a bedroom). Therefore, this should be made available - for everyone to the degree that is necessary and appropriate. (I also think sharing an apartment when you are single is a great thing actually, ecologically and socially - but that’s not the majority’s opinion so nevermind.) This seems to only work if we decouple the idea of income from daily necessities and expenses such as housing and food, but maybe others have better ideas.
It seems grotesque and absurd that a society would allow the question of whether or not to have kids - or how many kids to have - to become an economic one. Like, even for the most greedy capitalist assholes, what exactly is the plan when cheap labor cannot afford to have kids that will then provide cheap labor?
More of a sidenote:
I assume the idea is to be able to support a family and the sad logic that it often comes out “cheaper” to have one parent work and one stay at home rather than try to afford daycare.
It is a sad logic only in the fact that you cannot choose. Where I live it is definitely not cheaper to stay at home. Being able to truly choose whether you want to work or raise your kid yourself (up to a certain age) or a combination of whatever percentage would be freedom. Being financially obliged to do either is shit.
If you stay at home with a baby or a toddler, you are putting less burden on an overloaded childcare system, and you are raising future adults to be healthy, happy, and, from an economic perspective, functioning. You are not exactly having a lot of free time. It is enjoyable and fullfilling but not for everyone (which is why outsourcing a part of it if you don’t want to do it 100% is great). You got to be able to handle tantrums and lose your autonomy and perform understimulating activities a lot. Being a stay at home parent, at least for little kids, is not easy. Hell you can’t even take a pee break unless they allow it (and when they allow it). You don’t have holidays or weekends or nights off. I can’t believe this kind of care work is still not financially compensated. And I can’t believe that people who want to do that, who want to have kids and stay at home with them and raise them for their first years, just have to pass on all of this because of money.
No certain I agree 2 bedroom for minimum, but definitely getting a single bedroom or studio near where they work makes a whole lot of sense.
That sounds ok until you realize how many people have kids at least half time, but no adult partner. And a lot of those people don’t make much above min wage.
Even if they make slightly more than minimum now, a rising tide lifts all ships.
Plus minimum wage was intended to be the lowest single wage a family could be supported on. Just requiring it cover a 2br apartment is a far cry from the original intent
Good point. I’d kinda expect the government to help in that situation more.
Why should the government support bad businesses? Serious question, because we socialize losses (tax-paid anssistance) and privatize profits (they keep it, regardless how many employees are on assistance).
We do that already with welfare for people working a surprising number of places (Walmart and McDonald’s are prime examples, where they have published budgets assuming you will get government assistance)
Why is that ok, but requiring living wages isn’t?
Why don’t you agree with the 2 bedroom? Why can’t the working class have some leg room?
Then we’d have to call it “some leg room wage”
It’s the minimum wage, it’s supposed to be the minimum you need to survive. Conversely, you don’t need two bedrooms to survive
No, we call it the “minimum wage” because it’s the minimum to be legally paid
It’s meant to be a living wage, and in case that’s not clear enough for you
and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
quoted from FDR, the guy who got the initial minimum wage laws passed in the US
That’s not how supply and demand works. If you raise minimum wage so that it can pay for a two bedroom apartment, then demand for two bedroom apartments will skyrocket pushing the price put of range once more. The only way to do this is to couple the wage increase with artificial availability by creating rent controlled, minimum wage housing.
I live in the “Greater Jackson Hole” metro area which includes two Teton counties. One in Wyoming and one in Idaho (Wydaho). Our area is full of billionaires as well as double and triple digit millionaires. You will never see a “conservative” area with more aggressive nature conservation efforts than here. Why? Because the area is paradise and the billionaires have bought all the land in order to keep it pristine (and get a nice tax break). Unfortunately, everyone tried to move here during and after lockdown and now prices are ludicrous. The thing is that the rich still need services and workers to keep that quality of life up. What was the fix? They built affordable housing for the local workforce. Some of these include store/shop spaces on the first floor for practically zero rent as long as your business is helpful to the community or raises the quality of life. So many artisinal bakeries, coffee shops, yoga/Pilate’s studios, high end dog supplies and grooming, cultural artifact shops, etc. Seriously, the entire population of the area is roughly about 30k and I have access to more top tier coffee shops here than I did in the infamously hipster Austin, Texas.
If you ever want to know what systems will be effective, just look at what the mega-rich do for their own self-interest.
EDIT: During the early days of the lockdown, private jets were flying in with medical equipment (respirators) and supplies for the entire community. A billionaire couple donated some of the first COVID-19 blood test machines in the nation. If you tell me that in five years this area will have government subsidized living wages and free healthcare for all, I will believe you…as long as the program is tied to local service industry employment because the mega-rich won’t do anything unless it benefits them somehow.
Yes. That’s literally what I am trying to say. In a capitalist system, it is not enough to increase wages because the system will automatically adjust. Billionaires in my area inadvertently proved that the best way to increase quality of life is by introducing heavily subsidized programs. GASP…socialism
People looking out for themselves is in their nature. Animals do the same. People cooperate when they see that it is to their mutual advantage to do so, just as many animals evolve to do. People are animals. Animals are nature!
Calling people sociopaths for looking out for their own interests is to stretch the word so far it becomes meaningless. Everyone is a sociopath, except you and your friends, right? Right.