you make twice the minimum wage. Let's say you and I are living in your studio apartment. both of us have minimum wage paying jobs (so, your total paycheck) (and I don't have a truck or payment), both of us work jobs we can walk to. How many months do you think we could hold our head above water?
And in the most advanced and prosperous nation in history does it not seem a little...off if two full time incomes are insufficient for a couple to afford a basic standard of living for a child?
I heard the urban legend style stories about some McDonald's locations giving employees information on how to apply for food stamps.
It could be done, though you wouldn't like the comfort level. Depends on the income(s). More to the point, it is nobody else's responsibility to ensure that your income and your lifestyle meet at the same point. That's YOUR job. "It takes a village" is just another way of saying "Someone else should pay for my bad decisions."
I don't think we're looking at an unreasonable hope for a working couple to be able to raise a child on two incomes. To call that living beyond your means indicates a deep problem with the society those people live in, not one with the choices they have made. The alternative is to suggest most human beings should not reproduce, because most human beings will spend their reproductive years in lower wage brackets. Market forces alone do not make perfect drivers of wages if they allow those wages to disqualify people from the most basic of life choices and the need to reproduce is deeply rooted in basic human behaviour. So yes, it does take a village and that village has to apply laws to employers as well as those they employ else the power imbalances will only grow. The idea that employers are competing to attract employees in an equitable market which balances out everyone's well being if they try hard enough is simply not consistent with the reality we observe. Hence people in full time employment living in poverty in the developed world.
What Albert is hinting at is basically when people have kids before they're ready to. Got careless or unlucky with the birth control, or don't believe in birth control but still wanna fuck, yadda yadda yadda.
But that isn't in any way relevant to the point of the discussion. Young people have always made mistakes, they always will, but we are looking at whether in a modern developed nation it is really reasonable for someone in full employment to expect a basic standard of living. I put forward the suggestion that if that isn't the case then we need to look long and hard at how far we haven't come down the centuries and what progress we haven't made. For a fully employed stable couple the question of children will in any reasonable mind be a part of a basic standard of living. If that couple can realistically expect to be priced out of reproduction at all then it's hard not to perceive there being deep flaws in some of the premises which underly the society they live in. Neanderthals living brutish, violent lives off the land could have sex and feed their children. Surely we shouldn't be struggling to do the same as a consequence of the very social mechanisms we ourselves created. When all our progress as an enlightened species serves to make difficult a basic need our early hominid cousins found simple then I have to wonder whose interests that progress serves. If all we've achieved is to sharpen Darwins blade then we've made a terrible wrong turn somewhere.
Not all employment is equal, and most people shouldn't reproduce. And guess how long people who fail to adapt to their circumstances survive at a primitive hunter-gatherer level of advancement?
Hey, you're the one who brought up the neanderthals. I'm just observing how it actually undermines your point.
I'm sure that isn't an urban legend. I can guarantee if their workers have kids they qualify for SNAP benefits and WIC too (if it's still called that). Helping your employees take care of their families doesn't necessarily mean you aren't paying them enough. There are plenty of ther places they can work that don't pay enough to support a family - especially in a high cost of housing location. That's the reality of the situation like it or not.
Then geez, we really should focus on the means that actually help stop unintended pregnancies from occurring. It's not like we don't have decades and decades of studies that show overwhelming evidence of what actually helps mitigate the problem. Instead of handing everyone a bible and telling them their private parts are of the devil.
No. The root of the discussion is the question of the value of labor, not the undeniable fact that offering greater reward draws more interest.
I don't think it does. We're supposed to have progressed socially and technologically beyond the need for mere existence to be a brutish struggle against a hostile environment. We're supposed to be more advanced, to have been raised out of barbarism, but a great many seem eager to replicate those early struggles artificially. The world we create and leave to our children should not be one where we have replaced the harsh realities of genetic Darwinism with an equally harsh financial selectionism of our own making. Otherwise what was the point of the last few thousand years of recorded history?
Except for all those places where the exact same company is forced to pay higher wages yet still makes massive profits.
I would not be surprised to find some management or other employees trying to help out their people by doing such a thing. I do not think McDonalds itself would do such a thing. I have met some retail managers that try to help out wage slave employees. That is the thing, the local manager does not have a whole lot of say in their budget. Even the GM is ends up being a bit on the wage slave side of things from what I know. Those are people who often do give a fuck about their workers but cannot help them out much because most of the hiring and pay is dictated from above. We have to target the right people and right points on the scale. Is it the franchise owners in those districts that make those decisions? Is it the CEOs of McDonalds who make those decisions? Does the corporation that control's the franchises get to make a declaration they will pay this much to everyone and that filters down? Certain things like seniority and benefits for long term employment do not happen for people who move within franshises under the same umbrella. Amrica has a whole bunch of micro governing stuff going on because there is a huge variance of cost of living across our land. A Mcdonald's employee in the middle of NYC is not the same as one in the middle of nowhere arkansas even though they may be doing the exact same job.
It's bizarre that you continue to maintain this, after freely admitting that it's entirely irrelevant to you. I mean, the effect of your dogma could be that children are starving in the streets, that one person owns virtually all of societal wealth and that substantial numbers survive by trading their organs for food. And yet you'd still be pushing the same line. Do you pretend that the outcome isn't actually that bad given enough sacrifice to avoid having to confront this reality? I for one am glad that we have you. You provide a useful reductio ad absurdum for extremist capitalism.
Nobody is a fan of starving kids, and I do wish people wouldn't blunder themselves into situations like that, but I am not responsible for that outcome unless I caused the pregnancy. That's just using tired old emotional rhetoric to guilt me into subsidizing other people's bad decisions. Nobody else chose for you to become a parent, and nobody else is responsible for the consequences.
There are only two values of labor: the intersection of the supply and demand curves ("the price point for a given quantity"), and what it generates for a potential employer (less costs). Where the latter is greater than the former, firms hire. That's the end of it. What's not in there at all: skills, status, "intrinsic worth" or any of the other bullshit that especially UA is trying to impart on this. Skills change the supply curve (or rather, create supply curves in other industries requiring skills, and effectively lower the unskilled labor supply at the margin because they can hold out for a better offer), sure, but not only skills. A previously unrevealed preference (because there was no pandemic) to risk starving to death over risking death or disability from COVID can also change the supply curve for those industries where there is such a risk. And it is: at the price point a lot of restaurants are expecting, people prefer the risk of starving to death over the risk of death or disability from COVID and a smaller risk of starving to death (because like firms, labor providers have costs too, and restaurant wages aren't cutting it). It's all totally rational and self-interested, and if the restaurants don't figure this out soon, they're going to go out of business. And because I'm an evil capitalist, I'll say good riddance to them. Idiots.
And how exactly do you measure the value of labor? Your "feels"? You just feel like it should be low, so, it's low?
The amount of your tax dollars that goes to "subsidizing other people's bad decisions" is miniscule when compared to the amount spent on corporate subsidies and the military.
We're not talking about someone's "blunders". Not everything is reducible to personal choices. I'm referring to the possibility of objective economic conditions being such that there are no reasonable options for (at least some) people to avoid such outcomes. The point is that that could be the case and you'd still peddle these dogmas, by your own admission.
Wait a minute. UA is middle aged and he's still just barely struggling to get by? No wonder he didn't trust direct deposit. And I think I'm beginning to understand all the rage issues...
But when such a large portion of the fertile population are limited to making such a small income, whose "blunder" is it? No matter how hard individuals work or how skilled they are a significant portion will always be required to be stocking shelves, serving hamburgers, cleaning office space. How small a portion of the population should be able to afford to raise a child?
