Current Events > (R-SD) Sen Thume opposes $15/hour because he made $6/hour as a kid

(+) Yeah! (+)

dolomedes posted...

there's a lot of vacant homes in cities, too.

one train can fit a lot of people for an hour-long commute, vs the same number of people sitting alone in cars packing the aging roadways. also people would spend less money on fuel & repairs, auto accidents would drop drastically, etc. public transportation is amazing, far more important than building another city people would have to drive into.

we don't need more cities, we need to stop our cities from falling into dire straits. you wanna abandon detroit and pave over a national forest to build a new one? idk man the world is fucked, building new cities is only gonna send us further down the climate change abyss

This. Half of most towns are a ghost town because people cant afford to rent or buy. Why should be destroy what little nature we have left to build more cities that we dont need? How many more species of animals will be extinct to build more towns where the exact same thing will happen?

Zikten posted...

Republicans always want every generation to live like they did with with no societal progress made

It's the generation that beats kids and says their parents beat them and they turned out alright when they clearly didn't.
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I understand him because my job increased its base to $15 so fuck everyone else.

Sarcasm.

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Flockaveli posted...

Instead of raising the minimum wage, why cant we lower the cost of living?

This is the real issue right here.

You can raise minimum wage to whatever you want and in a lot of cases it won't matter because the cost of living would just rise to accomdate the higher wages putting most of us back to square one (except the people who were already making whatever the new minimum wage was or just slightly higher).


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Renovating cities could also work but one big issue is that we can design better cities now than they were able to back then.

Look at The Line in Saudi Arabia, I like what I see with that.

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AtelierRyza3462 posted...

The issue is that minwage jobs don't justify $15/hr.

if minimum wage had a fair and steady increase since the inception of minimum wage this would never be an issue and other jobs in other sectors would be compensated just as much.

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So who pays the wages off all these builders and pays for the materials?

Building costs have gone up insanely the last 20 years. You can't just build things without money coming in so the new homes will cost more than people can afford anyways.

No developer is going to fund massive building projects at a loss dude.

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Lord_Shadow_19 posted...

This is the real issue right here.

You can raise minimum wage to whatever you want and in a lot of cases it won't matter because the cost of living would just rise to accomdate the higher wages putting most of us back to square one (except the people who were already making whatever the new minimum wage was or just slightly higher).

The cost of living rises regardless of the wages, and the wages have therefore been decreasing. It's far easier for lawmakers to mandate that businesses pay at least a specific wage than to either put price caps on everything or figure out how to incentivize that same result across commodities, utilities, and real estate/property etc.

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Lord_Shadow_19 posted...

You can raise minimum wage to whatever you want and in a lot of cases it won't matter because the cost of living would just rise to accomdate the higher wages putting most of us back to square one

The cost of living rises even as the minimum wage has stagnated (decreased accounting for inflation.)

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AtelierRyza3462 posted...

The issue is that minwage jobs don't justify $15/hr.

if you are giving yourself 35-40+ hours a week to any corporation in this dumbass country you deserve a living wage

i hate this shit

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Antifar posted...

The cost of living rises even as the minimum wage has stagnated (decreased accounting for inflation.)

yes, because not everyone makes minimum wage. other peoples' wages have inflated as well.

Fam_Fam posted...

yes, because not everyone makes minimum wage. other peoples' wages have inflated as well.

By a tiny ass amount which still doesn't keep up with inflation and is literally a fraction of the wage growth seen by the elite.

And some jobs the pay really hasn't changed at all in 2 plus decades.

Whats your point?

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Fam_Fam posted...

yes, because not everyone makes minimum wage. other peoples' wages have inflated as well.

Not as much as healthcare, education, and housing costs
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/

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Antifar posted...

The cost of living rises even as the minimum wage has stagnated (decreased accounting for inflation.)

Oh for sure, that's why I'm saying the problem is that the cost of living keeps going up, the solution is to somehow bring down the cost of living. increasing the minimum wage is fine, but at best it's a bandaid to the real problem, a bandaid that may not even stay on very long either.

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LightHawKnight posted...

Why do people vote for these assholes?

Because they enable their hatred of minorities and LGBTQ people.

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AtelierRyza3462 posted...

The issue is that minwage jobs don't justify $15/hr.

You cannot demand a service then demean those that provide said service by saying they deserve to live in poverty. Well I mean, you can, it just makes you a shitty person.

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ScazarMeltex posted...

You cannot demand a service then demean those that provide said service by sahing they deserve to live in poverty. Well I mean, you can, it just makes you a shitty person.

This.

Most cities are already at the point where service workers can't afford to live there without multiple roommates or barely scraping by just to pay rent on a 250sq foot micro apartment.


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Minimum wage should really be around 20, the amount he earned adjusted for inflation.

And maybe people who don't want "burger flippers" to earn the same as them should want to get paid more. Don't EMT's barely make above minimum wage?
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yeah and I made $7.50 when I started working but that was 16 years ago

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Its funny to me to think that I worked at Walmart at 16 to 18 or so and if I had stayed there my whole life and gotten the max .30 cent raise each year id be up to a whopping 14.85 per hour.


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CanuckCowboy posted...

Its funny to me to think that I worked at Walmart at 16 to 18 or so and if I had stayed there my whole life and gotten the max .30 cent raise each year id be up to a whopping 14.85 per hour.

I remember when I started working in a Dell factory as a material handler back in 2006. I thought I had finally made it to the company I wanted to stay at and was going to try to move up the ladder. I talked to one of the people who had been there for a while about career advancement. His response? "Maaaan.... There's a lot of people who have been here for 10 or 12 years and still aren't making $10/hour."

I ended up getting let go from there, but I needed to get out of there any way.

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Payzmaykr posted...

I think we can come up with the money.

i expect the first place we'd turn for it would be the tax deduction we currently give to businesses and employees for buying health insurance through their jobs, which cost the federal government $273 billion in 2019

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-does-tax-exclusion-employer-sponsored-health-insurance-work

probably the next bit would be tax increases which for most would make the savings net neutral, and a net large loss for upper middle class and rich households.

huge, tremendous, massive gain for poor households though, as most expansions of the social safety net tend to be.

but it's pretty understandable that the party of the very rich and the kinda rich and the idiot racists would oppose an end to wealth transfer to the rich that instead gives that wealth to the poor.

so long as that party wields power in america, we won't see universal healthcare. and they are a heavily entrenched minority party.

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You cant just say or imply if you dont support a $15 minimum wage, you are a shitty person

One of the first things you learn in an economics class is that price floors (and ceilings) are not good for the economy. Doubling the minimum wage may be a popular move and may not make things worse or significantly worse, but its not going to make things better. On the other hand, while no minimum wage may be an ideal, theres no way it would work in reality. I think they should agree on a minimum wage, have it increase with inflation, and otherwise leave it alone.

But that being said, the problem people are trying to solve is that everyone who works a full-time job should be able to support themselves, but many cant. Increasing the minimum wage is a bad way to solve this. I think people should try to look at these alternative solutions rather than try to force a (large) minimum wage increase.

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Phantom36 posted...

Walking uphill both ways!
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