That's just greed. They're doing that already. Prices right now are crazy high, BUT guess what else is? PROFITS. Record profits everywhere. That shit should be illegal.
Are the record profits still record after being adjusted for inflation?
Money is worth less now than it was this time last year.
Let's say a profit of $1000 last year is equivalent to a profit of $1200 this year.
Have you made $200 more this year? Well, technically yes but it doesn't quite have the same purchasing power as it would have if you made it last year instead
Yes, record profits after inflation. Don't simp for the corporations, they don't give a fuck about you. They'd rather see you die than give you a penny.
There is a mentality from Boomers and passed along to Gen X that full-time work does not entitle you to anything. That there are just millions of jobs in America that shouldn’t be required to pay people enough to live in the community they work, or anywhere for that matter. As long as that mentality aligns with the goals of capitalism, nothing will change.
You will hear all the excuses in the world justifying low-paying jobs. “Just get a better job if you don’t like the pay” “Those jobs are only for high school kids” “If they raise the pay they will raise the prices” The list goes on. None of them make a ton of sense if you explore the idea any further.
The idea of working hard and being, eventually, rewarded with good pay has been dead for decades. It is widely accepted that the easiest way to increase your pay is moving to a different company, which speaks a lot about longevity in this late-stage capitalism era most of us are living in today.
I agree that people sbould be able to live comfortably with their job, even a low skill one. But the idea that raising wages will mean increase prices does check out though. That, or people with higher skill jobs will be paid less and then they will be the ones to suffer the most.
Imo, we should aim to make things more efficient, thus cheaper because they actually became cheaper. E.g. solving the housing crisis => cheaper rent. Public healthcare => cheaper healthcare. Better schools => better citizens that leave less trash around => less expensive trash management. More public transport, less need to buy or do maintenance to a car etc. And so on and so forth.
Minimum wages can't fix this problem (they can fix others), they're just a bandaid on a severed limb.
This is how brainwashed capitalism has made us. In a society that is purely driven by money the thought that giving people their fair share means my prices might increase. Instead, we should fix every societal problem first before doing the one thing that would actually work.
We have record inflation now, is it because major cities have passed $15+ minimum wage? Not at all, not even a little. Further proof that a pandemic has a thousand times more influence than simply paying people more.
Oh and the horrible thought a "high" skilled laborer might be paid less shudder. Like a doctor might only get paid $90k instead of $150k. How could they survive!?
What other convenient tropes should we trot out to disfranchise the only real solution of just paying people what they deserve. Oh that's right they don't deserve it because they are lazy or low-skilled or any of the other bullshit excuses we have been force fed our entire lives.
Eh I think you missed my point entirely. And, by the way, being a doctor is simply put very hard, that's why they're paid more than people who flip burgers who just flip burgers, and doctors are also rarer and I believe you want to have a good doctor don't you? Because he's simply going to get up and leave to another place where he is paid properly if you don't pay him a good wage. Also, you don't make any actual good points in your long answer.
I didn't miss your point because it was sophomoric in nature and therefore underdeveloped. Your belief in the meritocracy just shows how ridiculously brainwashed you are. It is okay, most of us are one way or another I suppose.
You are really reaching there Mr. I buy the rhetoric hook line and sinker. It is clear who is bitter here and it is not the accomplished father of four who owns a million dollar house. Good talking with you.
It's pretty funny to me to see Americans claiming that a full-time job should be sufficient to have your basic needs met - as if the unemployed should live in dire poverty.
I would fully support some kind of UBI or someway to ensure that those who can’t work can live semi-independent lives. But in order for there to be money to support that system, a majority of people do have to work.
The alternative is some kind of utopian society that has yet to exist. If we make it to Star Trek and not Blade Runner I will fully embrace the idea that everyone can have all of their needs covered without the requirement for others to indirectly support that through labor and taxes. But until then, improving workers ability to support themselves also improves the ability to support those who cannot.
Where I'm from there has been a minimum income guarantee since 1965. In fact, the constitution says the government should ensure every resident has sufficient income to live. A single-person household with someone who is permanently unemployed receives about $1500 per month (you receive additional money per child). This is the lowest income a legal resident is allowed to have. Every rich European country has a similar system, though most opt to cover rent for the poorest, and give a smaller amount for the remaining expenses.
It turns out that willingness to work isn't an issue, because most people don't actually like to do nothing. The employment rate is far higher than in the US.
My answer is more radical. Tie their tax breaks to the linearly interpolated value of the median wage in the company between minimum wage and whatever is actually a living wage. At halfway between the two they get an equilibrium point, below it is a harsh penalty, above is an increasing percentage of their tax break. Wonder how long it would take of McDonalds owing an obscene penalty on their taxes before they started actually paying employees.
I would also be in favor of levying MASSIVE corporate tax penalties for every employee on government assistance. At this point, government programs are less socialism for the people and more socialism for the likes of WalMart.
I like the idea of rent prices being tied directly to pay, maybe a straight %. It would be complicated, but pitting greedy landlords up against greedy businesses sound much more fair than getting fucked from both sides.
Landlords want to make the most money, but if what they can charge was directly tied to minimum wage, they will actually fight to raise pay. Not for altruism or any positive reason, but because they want to increase their own revenue.
It’s not a great idea, but it’s something I’ve thought about for a decade or so. Especially when that “Fight for $15” took so long to that even if $15 was the minimum wage, it would still be way behind to cost of living.
Landleeches can get fucked as far as I am concerned. Implement a chit system like NYC taxies so only a fixed number of single family homes can be rentals in a town, make strict livability (not habitability) standards for those rentals with steep fines and inspections every 2 years, and cap rent at a % of the real value of the property. You let a house languish so it is only worth $40k, you don't get to charge $2k/month to live there.
It’s not like I’m pro landlord. But, being realistic about a capitalist society, pitting those with opposing interests to fight one another is so much better than both of those things existing uncheck and us being the victim.
Yeah, I agree that it would be popcorn worthy, but I also have a strong suspicion that doing that would end up getting gamed by both and consumers would have compounding losses.
When applied to multinationals, it would result in companies exporting high skill jobs overseas to bring pay down. Would need to legislate behavior as well to stop companies trying to get around it
I like this idea. It reduces my primary concern with raising the minimum wage, that it would cause a dramatic and hard to control increase in the inflation rate. Inflation/Cost off of living would increase, but it would probably be controllable under these circumstances.
And somehow there always seems to be just enough of these "mOdErAteS" to kneecap a Democratic majority from doing what they promised when they get power.
It's why big business donates to both parties. Even democrats can be fooled by the corporate propaganda and they all got fundraising targets to meet if they want to keep their seat.
The same Dem everyone dragged for being a Dem in name only almost as soon as she started voting dogshit completely contrary to what she ran on? The same Dem who literally left the party because she was never anything more than a corporate shill too corrupt even for the milquetoast neoliberals in the Democratic Party?
There are a lot of US states that have skirted union protections by not banning unions themselves, but just banning workplaces from requiring union membership for employees. It's called a "right to work" law that is implemented many different ways in many different states that makes unions a hard thing to nail down for the federal government.
As far as a federal ban on these laws, I think we are more in a position of fighting against a federal version of them, which is more likely to have support, than we are in a position to fight for a federal ban against those laws, though there are efforts.
You are right both sides aren't the same. But by absolute standards, both sides are really really bad and I think that's a fair assessment all things considered. One has to be better than the other, but both are bad.
Just raising the minimum wage won't do anything other than intensify class warfare for anyone who isn't rich or mildly rich (making more than 200k per year) and work further in the Republicans favor. What needs to happen is this:
Cut social security entirely (all this shit does is support the old rich fucks) and instead initiate a universal basic income which yields a yearly income equivalent to working a full time job at 18.50 an hour. Why 18.50? Because that's the amount needed to cover the cost between the 7.50 minimum wage and 26 an hour which is where the minimum wage would be if wages hadn't stagnated. Furthermore this increases everyone's wealth by the same amount so the people at the top effectively get nothing while the middle class is also helped in addition to those near the poverty line (effectively mitigating potential class warfare). Also the homeless would be helped, whereas a minimum wage increase would only help those with jobs.
Pay for the UBI with taxes that massive tax anyone effectively making over 1million a year. This means corporations and billionaires. In order to do this we have to break the slimy garbage they pull to leverage their non-liquid wealth to avoid paying any taxes while further increasing their billions.
Impose strict regulations on corporations so that they cannot arbitrarily raise their costs in response to the newly raised tax rates.
Or don't skip the polls. Both sides will shoot at you, but one side will shoot much sooner because it wouldn't necessarily be political suicide for them.
Imagine my surprise when the election comes and goes, one way or another, and these online revolutionaries continue to do... nothing of substance. Just like 4 years ago, and the 4 years before that, and...
see the university protests and unionization if you want an example in the us. we are organizing protests and actions, but doing systemic change is a collective endeavour.
we actually need much more people to recognize its broken and be willing to help. that wont happen if all you do is begrudingly accept the progressively worsening lesser evils.
totalitarian fascism is already there, the crackdowns on the university protests are looking a lot like it. violence towards the protesters, a pat on the head on the fascist counterprotesters.
and honestly its looking a lot like trump will win anyway, at least that is what the polls are looking like.
we should be bracing for impact.
edit: how could i forget the treatment the us gives to the third world.
Yeah. We have an ongoing thing between Tesla and IF Metall, with a bunch of other unions backing them up. Tesla refuses to sign collective labour agreements, and they're penalising strikers by taking away stocks they've earned. It's hardly surprising that Tesla doesn't want to adhere to the Swedish model.
If young adults consistently and reliably voted at all, we wouldn't be in a position choosing between this and seeing what "Israel should finish the job" means.
in my country voting is mandatory for everyone over 18, and we mostly suffer through the same problems as you when it comes to politicians. i wish it were as simple as getting more people to vote.
You forget that dems vote against it as well:
Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, Jon Tester, Tom Carper, Chris Coons, Angus King...
You also forget that a $15/hour minimum wage isn't even a living wage in current year and that's what they voted against. Both sides fight for billionaires, stop deluding yourself.
Both sides fight for billionaires, stop deluding yourself.
Nobody's deluding themselves. I'm pretty sure we all know full well that both sides fight for billionaires, it's a question of degree and that degree matters. Is $15/hr more or less than $7.25/hr?
IOW, it's a start... it's progress. I get that the progress is frustratingly slow. But once you have $15/hr you can keep incrementing it, especially at the state level.
Considering the former ain’t fucking happening because Democrats voted with Republicans, your question is irrelevant.
Which bill are you referring to precisely? The Raise the Wage Act of 2019 was passed by the House but not taken up by the Senate, which at the time had an R majority. The 2021 "American Rescue Plan" bill had an amendment added by Sanders to raise the FMW to $15 but this was removed because it wouldn't have passed otherwise. An important distinction here is that a number of the 8 democrats who voted to remove the amendment were doing so so that the pandemic relief part could pass. Their various reasons are outlined here. The amendment was a bit of a hail mary that few expected to even make it for purely procedural reasons. So this was a compromise... it wasn't saying "we democrats don't want a FMW increase". There are a couple of DINOs that think that, sure, but two of them are going away.
There are other options here, such as HR 603 (2021-22) which hasn't been taken up yet. Some dems oppose this because it takes too long to get to $15/hr. But of course we need a house majority to make any progress on that.
And notably, Biden via EO raised the minimum wage for federal workers to $15/hr.
The fight isn't over. But if anything this just underlines the need for stronger majorities. Throwing up your hands and giving in because it didn't happen right away is, well, not helpful.
Glad to see someone admit that Republicans and Democrats work together to screw people who work for a living.
But is this where your understand of the American political system begins and ends?
No, just glad to see someone finally fucking admit that Democrats have no intention whatsoever of helping workers, regardless of the lies they tell to get elected.
just glad to see someone finally fucking admit that Democrats have no intention whatsoever of helping workers
Your statement is patently and frankly egregiously false. I'm going to list a few things here, but I'm not going to engage with you further. You seem to want to just lazily stamp your feet and just be mad for reasons.
American Rescue Plan Act: Estimated to have cut the poverty rate by 50%; increased SNAP benefits by 15%; increased unemployment insurance and earned income tax credit. Crucially, it also bailed out 185 underfunded pension plans with 1.5 million participants, something unions had been asking for for almost a decade.
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
Biden is very pro-union. He has: personally visited a UAW picket line in support of striking workers. Invested in union jobs via the CHIPS and Science act; Increased enforcement of worker rights and unionizing via NLRB and DOL
It's true the Protecting the Right to Organize Act didn't pass because we don't have enough votes to overcome the GOP filibuster. Imagine what we could do if more progressives actually bothered to vote?
I found an awful lot just googling "what have democrats done for workers?", including this expansive article from which some of the above points are cribbed
You don't understand how we stop living under the whims of a broken system. By fixating these details completely divorced from the actual helping of others you are prepetuating that those details matter. You are lost and you have no idea what matters.
You have to choose to find the minutia of the system moot and engage in it's rejection by communicating that to others. By justifying actions that caused harm you give the system legitimacy. This really isn't that hard or weird.
The 2021 “American Rescue Plan” bill had an amendment added by Sanders to raise the FMW to $15 but this was removed because it wouldn’t have passed otherwise.
Because one unelected bureaucrat said so.
Their various reasons are outlined here.
Count the republican talking points about the minimum wage in that link.
if you want affordable housing we need to de-commodify it and get the investors out. no more airbnb, no more one investor group owning 10s of thousands of single family homes. Dumping regular people's money into this system, even if we give them a bunch extra, is only gonna drive prices even further up. The necessities of living are not speculation opportunities for the ultra rich.
hard same. I'm just tryna actually have something at the end of a lifetime of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the privilege of remaining alive. But the people who already have most of everything are like "Why shouldn't I have all of this guy's money and the house?" Swear to God we'll only have to eat one of them and the rest will fall right back in line.
Government isn’t a monolith, nor are the parties that run it.
Indeed, big government is a behemoth where one hand doesn't know what the other does and it doesn't think past the next election cycle. Do you think that replacing parts of the brain can change anything about that?
We need to remove mortgage backed securities as well housing shouldn't be part of a portfolio.. I am really hating how properties in in demand areas is allowed to sit and decay. There are many properties in Manhattan that have done nothing for decades. There also needs to be fewer regulations with regard to what can be done with them.
I really wouldn't mind a decent Japanese style pod hotel if the price was like $10. An old office building would do well for that.
Mortgage backed securities are a huge part of the mortgage market. Without them it would be more difficult to get a mortgage as there would be less liquidity in the market. The low rates caused a problem though, because investors sought better returns than 1-2% and bought real estate directly.
I'm not sure housing is even a commodity currently. Commodities tend to be interchangeable and generally are affordable or low margin. None of those is true with housing currently.
No more AirBNB for entire properties.. If you need to rent out a room a few nights a week to get by it shouldn't be a problem banning those does a disservice to people who want to take a vacation without be thousands of dollars in the red, and for home owners and renters strapped for cash. Plus it would give hotels clear monopoly status, and reduce choices for basic accommodations for travelers.
This is the correct answer. If minimum wages go up, the price of everything you buy with those wages increases as well, including housing. There's artificial scarcity in housing right now because of investment firms and property management firms.
California does. We have a state minimum wage of $15/hr, city minimum wages, (varies by the city, but here in San Diego it's currebtly $16.85 an hour) and now food service minimum wage of $20 an hour at the state level.
Oh yeah. I never said that they are keeping up with COL, but they are doing something at least. I personally think that corporations should be banned from owning residential property, but I don't believe the political will is there to actually manage to do that.
So, honest question that comes of my own ignorance. Is a minimum wage supposed to be livable? I always figured minimum wage jobs were for people like teens who didn't need to afford housing.
Yea so that's the argument that people who don't agree with making a liveable wage give. In reality there is just a great group of people who are only eligible for minimum wage or close to minimum wage jobs. So a fair bit of adults that are even trying to support their children.
So I think we can all agree that especially if 2 parents are working 40 hours a week should be able to at least live a decent life in a Western country. And that's mainly in to question here. For teens you could always have a lower minimum wage until they're older. As they have in plenty countries.
Since when housing should be considered a luxury? If you make minimum wage you should be at least capable of buying a small modest house/apartment which is impossible nowadays...
It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt, making his intentions pretty clear.
