Barbara Lee, candidate for US Senate from California, defends call for $50 federal minimum wage: 'Just barely enough'

[Professor Emeritus]

great way to inflame inflation and give corporations an even greater stranglehold over society and the economy




I regularly pay people that much or more for skilled labor but it's really an outrageous sum of money for the majority of the workforce

If you divided your annual income from all sources by the # of hours you actually work per year, about how much do you make an hour?

And how much would you need to make to maintain your current lifestyle?

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Breh, "Let's talk about pegging MW to inflation" would be asking for the bare minimum necessary, it would NOT represent an effort to shift the Overton Window. I'm 100% convinced now that you really don't know what I said there.

Literally floating the minimum wage would be a proper and respectable shifting of the Overton window that reflects a true policy change.

“Shifting the overton window” is not moon shot napkin proposals.

Please. Respect the audience.

Because it wouldn't demonstrate anything.

You literally are defending some random whole number multiple of 10x on principle just cause it sounds nice, not because you have any investigation on what it does macro economically

Talking about $50/hour, and showing how minimal even that wage actually is to meet basic needs in today's economy,

Basic needs are determined by the costs and availability of those needs not income.

If those needs are made cheaper then income becomes less of a constraint

helps prove something about why $15/hour isn't that much at all. Saying $1000/hour would have no such effect. I thought that was obvious from the beginning, but clearly I was overestimating you.

If you think you should live comfortably on minimum wage, then why not raise the minimum wage as high as possible?

Again, you live with the assumption that the minimum wage should be a livable wage. I do not.

There's a reason why you don't want to mention your own hourly wage or give a figure for what would represent your own minimal family expenses.

Because I dont know you and this isn’t helping your argument?

Because you know that admitting how hard it is for you to make such a budget would prove the same point she was making.

This is pure speculation on your behalf, especially since you haven’t listed your own income to prove said point. If you’re broke, say that.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

i knew i recognized that pretentious posting style

Dude really tries to intimidate people who aren’t paying attention to the shell game here.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

great way to inflame inflation and give corporations an even greater stranglehold over society and the economy




I regularly pay people that much or more for skilled labor but it's really an outrageous sum of money for the majority of the workforce

Precisely.

The point of minimum wage is to set a universal floor. A literal standard for teenagers, unskilled labor, and foundational transactional terms of commerce. It’s not meant to be that with which the least effort is required to provide comfort or stability.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Literally floating the minimum wage would be a proper and respectable shifting of the Overton window that reflects a true policy change.

That's not a shifting of the Overton Window at all, because the idea of having the minimum wage keep up with inflation ALREADY IS acceptable in the mainstream. Just because it hasn't been employed consistently doesn't mean that it wasn't within the acceptable range of discourse. People have seriously argued for having the minimum wage keep up with inflation ever since it was first implemented, and over multiple periods of US history it HAS kept up with inflation over time.

"Shifting the Overton Window" doesn't just mean implementing a new policy, it means making something acceptable that was previously NOT considered acceptable at all. If pegging the minimum wage to inflation is already a mainstream idea, then arguing for that has no impact onf the Overton Window.

I was right, you really didn't understand the term. Now that I explained it to you, do you see what she is trying to do and how it differs from what you're arguing for?

Again, you live with the assumption that the minimum wage should be a livable wage. I do not.

Of course you don't. You, like the other wealthy corporate dems who are commenting/dapping in this thread, don't actually give a fukk about "unskilled" people maintaining a liveable existence. You need them to stay poor, you need their lives to stay hard, so that they provide cheap labor that makes your own lives that much easier. You literally think you've better than them and deserve more than them.

Because I dont know you and this isn’t helping your argument

Whether you know me is irrelevant. You are perfectly happy to be part of the public determination of other people's wages, but when it comes to your own wage, suddenly that's private info that can't even be discussed on an anonymous forum?

You like the caste economy. You like holding your own life to a completely different standard than what you think other people deserve.

I'll ask again - what do you actually make per year, and what's the minimum you'd need to make to maintain a family at your standard of living?

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Do you know what housing, food, transport, health care, quality education, and legal representation all have in common?

Access to every single one is mitigated by how much money you have.

Why did it take me mentioning that policy changes can drive these costs down without mandating incomes rise?

I support building more housing and crushing NIMBYs.

I support public transportation

I support expansions of costs and access to healthcare

I support education access

did you miss this?

You can do all of these reforms without mandating increases to MINIMUM income

You can try to equalize access to every one of those, one at a time, municipality by municipality. It's hard as fukk. Or you can actually raise the floor of how much money the people at the bottom have and improve their chances at all of them all at once.

It’s too hard? Nah, thats a cowardly answer, even for you. Who gives a fukk? Thats why policy change is hard and the easy thing you all do is just tell people to increase the minimum wage while skipping over these real tangible shifts we’re seeing.

Nah, this is just voodoo commie nonsense.

The point is that you can’t boost the bottom infinitely. You actually need productive incomes from people who are actually earning that amount of money and showing that value in a way thats sustainable, and not artificial bookkeeping that moving the minimum wage reflects. I.e. the makers gotta make.

Municipalities are being exposed to the subsidizes cars have been given and are rebuilding actual communities now by removing zoning and parking striations. That alone is causing massive shifts in affordability of housing that we haven’t seen in decades. It’s a win-win for developers and cities looking to stabilize tax bases as suburbs become tax sinkholes.

Inflation is barely impacted at all by minimum wages.

stimulus says otherwise

Increasing the wage floor disproportionately helps the people at the bottom,

Who gives a shyt, I mean honestly?

Being on the bottom isn’t the problem here. The problem is what it costs to be on the bottom and what it takes to get out of the bottom. Skills, education, opportunity and resources are needed. Financial accounting tricks won’t cut it.

it's not possible to cause an increase in inflation nearly as large as the boost you're giving the poor when the extra funds you're injecting are only going to the poor.

I didn’t think you were this shameless before and it’s getting more obvious now.

Without the requisite policy changes in resources, this money evaporates.

i.e. you can give out stimulus and child tax credits but if theres no infrastructure to actually create baby sitters or transit networks then the small amounts of money you give to “the poor” (because it’ll never be enough) doesn’t go far enough to not being a financial burden on those who most benefit from those resources.

There's a reason why those who care about the rich (see: Reagan Administration) are always OBSESSED with inflation. The fact that the poor get more money while the power of the wealthy's dollar decreases slightly is a double loss for them.

Well it’s important that middle class people not feel pinched by actually being productive and being able to save less. Being poor shouldn’t come with the lack of stakes in everyone else’s fortunes.

This is out of touch as fukk.

Gas isn't "low as hell" right now, and gas is only a minor portion of the cost of transportation.

Which is why we should create more mass transit and other means to reduce the burden of individual fuel consumption

For a leftist you really aren’t thinking about actual systemic policy changes. Low hanging fruit seems beneath you...

Are you simultaneously going to bring down the cost of a car, cost of maintenance, cost of insurance, AND gas prices? Or maybe just make sure they have more money to start with.

Ironically, the USA is doing that…

Even if you COULD do all of that simultaneously, which is almost impossibly difficult in a capitalist society, that still wouldn't equalize access.

I dont know what equalizing access means. I know that The Texas Triangle is building a massive high speed train network and that we’re making EV charging stations and that the FAA is testing supersonic passenger jets. I know that these trickle down and improve the way of life for commuters and travelers looking to not rely on expensive individualized transit capacities and I want more of it.

I dont know why this appeal to the poorest among us is some marker of what societal success looks like if you keep moving the goalposts to indicate some additional shortcoming, as if we weren’t aware of the inherent imperfection of making progress.

You’re not actually focused on solutions here

If the cheapest shyt were somewhat cheaper, but there continued to be massive disparities in wages,

Thats a skills problem, not an income problem

then poor people could at most just hope to get the very bottom level of everything.

Yeah, thats a skills problem. Plus, I’m not advocating for a society where recreation is “valued” equally as productive labor. Fully automated luxury communism is good for daydreaming, not …everything else

The worst education, the worst health care, the worst housing, etc.

WHICH IS WHY GOVERNMENTS MUST PROVIDE THESE THINGS AND EXPAND ACCESS TO THEM...

You dont get to raise the minimum wage while neglecting these things.

again, I was the one who told you about the inflection point of housing prices specifically because cities are doing the difficult thing of changing zoning laws.

And yes, inviting CAPITALIST BUILDERS to make more housing available

And it's easy as fukk for the rich to continue to create incentives (luring doctors away, luring lawyers away, luring teachers away,

this is why states and cities are making incentives to make the cost of living cheaper to provide incentives to not siphon their talents and contributions away from society

FYI none of these are minimum wage jobs, but are skilled professions….

buying up extra housing, etc.) which keep the poor from getting jack shyt.

which is why we’re building more housing

If you increase the low-end wages and bring them closer to the other wages, you give the poorest people a chance to actually be competitive in each of those domains, so that they can access the real shyt and not just get the dregs of everything else as mediated by capitalism.

People who don’t provide value dont get to make the same income of those who provide more value


WTF are you talking about?

Should someone who read fewer books than you, or writes fewer papers than you’ve written, make more than you?








@voiture @Creflo ½ Dollar @invalid @Pressure @wire28 @ADevilYouKhow @88m3 @MeachTheMonster @Wargames @Tair @Da_Eggman

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

That's not a shifting of the Overton Window at all, because the idea of having the minimum wage keep up with inflation ALREADY IS acceptable in the mainstream.

It’s not policy. It’s an idea at the moment.

This is why a real “shift” would be enacting a monumental change in how minimum wage is reimagined.

What you’re doing is just doing the same thing thats always done, which is not revolutionary. Raising the minimum wage arbitrarily is literally the status quo.

Just because it hasn't been employed consistently doesn't mean that it wasn't within the acceptable range of discourse. People have seriously argued for having the minimum wage keep up with inflation ever since it was first implemented, and over multiple periods of US history it HAS kept up with inflation over time.

its not even done, so again you dont have anything to stand on. You dont get to be a revolutionary with no changes to actual policy

"Shifting the Overton Window" doesn't just mean implementing a new policy, it means making something acceptable that was previously NOT considered acceptable at all. If pegging the minimum wage to inflation is already a mainstream idea, then arguing for that has no impact onf the Overton Window.

PEGGING THE MINIMUM WAGE IS NOT ACCEPTABLE CURRENTLY BECAUSE ITS NOT DONE…IF IT WAS ACCEPTABLE, IT WOULD BE DONE.

Raising the minimum wage is literally the status quo.

I was right, you really didn't understand the term. Now that I explained it to you, do you see what she is trying to do and how it differs from what you're arguing for?

You’re shadowboxing with a term you didn’t even use correctly because you’re advocating doing what you’ve always done.

Of course you don't. You, like the other wealthy corporate dems who are commenting/dapping in this thread, don't actually give a fukk about "unskilled" people maintaining a liveable existence.

I dont know any unskilled workers who make minimum wage

You need them to stay poor, you need their lives to stay hard, so that they provide cheap labor that makes your own lives that much easier. You literally think you've better than them and deserve more than them.

Why can’t they garner more wages for their unskilled labor?

Whether you know me is irrelevant. You are perfectly happy to be part of the public determination of other people's wages, but when it comes to your own wage, suddenly that's private info that can't even be discussed on an anonymous forum?

If youre depending on public intervention to determine your compensation and comfort then it will never be enough such that you won’t quickly claim how little you can do with it.

You like the caste economy. You like holding your own life to a completely different standard than what you think other people deserve.

I'll ask again - what do you actually make per year, and what's the minimum you'd need to make to maintain a family at your standard of living?

You go first.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

It’s not policy. It’s an idea at the moment.

The "Overton Window" doesn't have JACK shyt to do with which ideas are current policy or not. The Overton Window covers all ideas which are currently considered acceptable in mainstream discourse. Thus "pegging the minimum wage to inflation" has already been within the Overton Window for decades and talking about it does nothing to shift that window at all. You're proving over and over that even when you have it explained to you carefully, you still don't know what the term means.

Rep. Barbara Lee, in that particular speech, wasn't suggesting a policy she thought could be enacted immediately. She was playing out a thought experiment with the longer-term goal of increasing the options that people can see as acceptable. By pointing out how barely affordable a modern US life is even at $50/hour, she's hoping to increase people's threshold for what they view as acceptable in a minimum wage. She's knows she's not going to shift the window to $50/hour, but using the thought experiment of how it's still not always easy to make it at $50/hour helps people be more receptive to considering $15/hour, to considering $18/hour, to considering $20/hour.


That's the same thing I'm doing when I ask you or @88m3 how much you actually make in an hour, and how much you would need to support a family with your current lifestyle choices. If you know full well that you would be incapable of supporting yourself at a wage anything like what you expect them to live on, then why aren't you willing to consider at least a little bit better for them?

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

The "Overton Window" doesn't have JACK shyt to do with which ideas are current policy or not. The Overton Window covers all ideas which are currently considered acceptable in mainstream discourse. Thus "pegging the minimum wage to inflation" has already been within the Overton Window for decades and talking about it does nothing to shift that window at all. You're proving over and over that even when you have it explained to you carefully, you still don't know what the term means.

Pegging the minimum wage is more of a window shifting strategy than raising the minimum wage, which is the status quo policy chosen by progressives for decades instead of more stable and sustainable policy changes as mentioned previously.

Rep. Barbara Lee, in that particular speech, wasn't suggesting a policy she thought could be enacted immediately. She was playing out a thought experiment with the longer-term goal of increasing the options that people can see as acceptable. By pointing out how barely affordable a modern US life is even at $50/hour, she's hoping to increase people's threshold for what they view as acceptable in a minimum wage. She's knows she's not going to shift the window to $50/hour, but using the thought experiment of how it's still not always easy to make it at $50/hour helps people be more receptive to considering $15/hour, to considering $18/hour, to considering $20/hour.

Its a stupid point because she is gifting her opponents fodder to paint her as fiscally irrational and temperamentally incompetent

The wage isn’t the problem here if your only policy option is arbitrarily throwing out numbers and not adjusting what minimum wage earners can actually do with their appropriately low incomes.

That's the same thing I'm doing when I ask you or @88m3 how much you actually make in an hour, and how much you would need to support a family with your current lifestyle choices. If you know full well that you would be incapable of supporting yourself at a wage anything like what you expect them to live on, then why aren't you willing to consider at least a little bit better for them?

You are projecting your own inability to provide for yourself onto us. You dont know me and if you want to express why you’re only qualified for minimum wage, then you should lead by example and show us why you don’t make enough money and what you have in mind to remedy that.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

You are projecting your own inability to provide for yourself onto us. You dont know me and if you want to express why you’re only qualified for minimum wage, then you should lead by example and show us why you don’t make enough money and what you have in mind to remedy that.

This comment reeks of your superiority complex, and shows exactly why I think you don't give a shyt about people poorer than you. Like the other handful of HL capitalist establishment dems that always group together, you're proud that other people were born into worse situations than yourself, and like to mock their financial situation just like any a$$hole corporate libertarian would.

Spoiler

FYI, from the moment I had my first degree in hand, I have never once in my life struggled to earn a liveable income. I full well know that a series of fortuitous and in some cases frankly unfair circumstances led to me gaining the skillsets I have and the degrees I earned, and as a result it is far easier for me to provide for my family than it is for 90% of the country. The same goes for my wife. Each of us have held jobs lucrative enough that either one of us could have easily covered all of our expenses by ourself, and either one of us could gain such a job again (and substantially more) at the drop of a hat.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Breh really said that housing has become way more affordable recently. That's even worse than the "gas is low as hell" claim.


℃ertifed, your entire Gish Gallop can be summarized in a single ideological difference between us. You desire large stratification of income and resources, and hope that it continues. I wish for much less stratification of income and resources, and support policies that reduce such.


You claim that my desire to increase the purchasing power of the poor is "voodoo economics", which is absolutely bizarre. If the poor have more money, then there is more economic incentive to meet their demands, and they become more competitive for every resource. That's not voodoo economics, that's among the most straightforward economic truths possible.


You, on the other hand, claim the better option is to decrease the cost of literally every essential resource without actually changing the governing system of economics at all. This will obviously fail for three major reasons.

1. It is far more difficult to significantly decrease the cost of every essential good than it is to increase the income of a single disadvantaged subgroup. There are many examples of a single law immediately increasing the wages of poor workers on a large scale. There are no examples of us ever systematically reducing the price and increasing availability of housing, food, transport, health care, quality education, and legal assistance simultaneously.....or even over a longer timeframe, for that matter.

2. Even if you successfully decreased the cost of goods, if you haven't changed the relative purchasing power of the poor, then you're ensuring they will continue to get fukked. Even if the absolute cost of certain resources is reduced, the relative purchasing disparity will remain, so the rich will still leverage their outsized power in the economy to hoard resources and social access and ensure that what the poor get is the worst of what is available. Even if housing is cheaper, the poor will still be in the worst housing. Even if education is cheaper, the poor will still get the worst education. Even if health care is cheaper, the poor will still get the worst health care. The best lawyers, doctors, teachers, childcare programs, etc. will flow to where the money is, and the poor will gets the leftovers. Their homes will still be in the places with the worst pollution, worst crime, worst social access. Because you haven't closed the economic power gap at all, the gaps in the relative quality of access will remain large.

3. Worst of all, your ideas will never work out because you create ZERO ongoing political incentive to carry them out. If the poor remain financially poor, then we all know that policies to help the poor will NEVER be consistently implemented. Even if one enlightened administration improves affordable housing, the next one in the pockets of the rich will scale it right back. Even if one administration improves public transport, the next can take it all away. Someone will increase taxes to improve education access for the poor, and the moment a recession hits, the rich clamor for those taxes to be halved and the funding is destroyed.


You and I full well know that so long as the poor lack money, their desires drive nothing. Services for the poor as distributed via government only improve to the degree that the wealthy at that particular time feel compassionate and willing to help them. The moment any outside circumstance reduces that temporary compassion, the services for the poor are reduced as well. That is the state of the problem, and that can ONLY change by either rejecting capitalism as a governing principle, or by increasing the economic power of the poor relative to everyone else. I prefer the first option, but am willing to settle temporarily for the second.

You aren't willing to do either, and instead just wave your hands around promising bullshyt while knowing full well that nothing you say will ever deliver anything more than the status quo.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Being on the bottom isn’t the problem here. The problem is what it costs to be on the bottom and what it takes to get out of the bottom. Skills, education, opportunity and resources are needed. Financial accounting tricks won’t cut it.

This is disingenuous as fukk. You've already admitted that your system REQUIRES low-paid unskilled laborers to function. You can't just magically transfer the entire population into "skilled labor", and you full well know that - if you trained up everyone, then who would do all the jobs that you don't want to pay a living wage to?

Not to mention that we haven't actually offered our disadvantaged populations the slightest move towards better "skills, education, opportunity, and resources" in the last 50 years. Both Republicans and Democrats have used that mantra to claim that's how they'd lift people out of poverty, but in reality we've seen inequality GROW for almost my entire lifetime, low-end education quality stagnate, and opportunity become even more out of reach. Economic mobility in America is far worse now than it was in previous generations, and you offer nothing to change that.

I dont know what equalizing access means. I know that The Texas Triangle is building a massive high speed train network and that we’re making EV charging stations and that the FAA is testing supersonic passenger jets.

Yeah, it's definitely clear that you don't know what equalizing access means.

People who don’t provide value dont get to make the same income of those who provide more value

As if our system is based on any real measure of "providing value".

There are highly-regarded economic papers demonstrating that preschool teachers provide an insane amount of value....yet that is one of the lowest-paid professions in the country. I think the average childcare provider provides far more value than the average political scientist - but the political scientist is always going to get paid much more. The construction workers who build a home have provided much more value than the landlord who uses his access to capital to buy that home in a downturn and then rent it out (or flip it at a profit) when the market moves up. Home health aides provide a hell of a lot more value for individual lives than jewelry dealers do - yet the person dealing jewelry is living large, while the home health aide makes minimum wage. How does any particular restaurant's cook provide less value than any particular firm's bonds trader, other than the fact that such traders are part of the power structure that has artificially gamed the setup of the economy to incentivize what they do, regardless of whether it is beneficial to society? Every single farm laborer provides an essential, valuable service for our population, and works hard as fukk under terrible conditions to do so. Can you make the same claim of every stockbroker?

Look up what an EMT makes. Look up what an emergency dispatcher makes. Look up what a social worker makes. Then compare that to the salaries made by realtors, by advertizers, by all sorts of consultants and administrators who know how fukking superfluous they are.

I wanted to highlight and bold all of those because those are the exact professions you're shytting on and telling them they don't deserve to make a living wage because they don't have value. I happen to think that what they do has a lot more value than what some of y'all do.


Your bullshyt assumptions about some sort of meritocratic system of distributing wages are just that - pure bullshyt. Minimum wage earners don't earn less than capitalists because they provide less value. They earn less because they work in occupations which have never have the power to demand higher wages for themselves. The incentives in the system are fukked up, and only a Status Quo Warrior like yourself could pretend to be blind to that.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

This comment reeks of your superiority complex, and shows exactly why I think you don't give a shyt about people poorer than you. Like the other handful of HL capitalist establishment dems that always group together, you're proud that other people were born into worse situations than yourself, and like to mock their financial situation just like any a$$hole corporate libertarian would.

I’m not mocking anyone. You’re confused, per usual. The fact is, that macroeconomics can’t take the sting of every obstacle in life away because activists like you will always find some fault or decry someone who just isn’t being helped enough. When I suggested policy reforms as we’re seeing in housing, you said it was too difficult. Well, thats just to bad, isn’t it?

FYI, from the moment I had my first degree in hand, I have never once in my life struggled to earn a liveable income. I full well know that a series of fortuitous and in some cases frankly unfair circumstances led to me gaining the skillsets I have and the degrees I earned,

are you admitting to cheating or that you’re just too awwshucks humble to be accountable for your own success?

and as a result it is far easier for me to provide for my family than it is for 90% of the country. The same goes for my wife. Each of us have held jobs lucrative enough that either one of us could have easily covered all of our expenses by ourself, and either one of us could gain such a job again (and substantially more) at the drop of a hat.

However, for quite a while now we've chosen to forgo such salary work to pursue our passions instead. We solicit funding for large-scale projects and only take for ourselves a minimal living stipend from that funding. That enables us not only to run the projects of our dreams, but also to offer our spare time pro bono to other projects we care about, which themselves could not afford to pay us wages anything like what our skill sets could command. At times, when we've wanted to increase the reach of our work or employ a greater # of people under our umbrella, we've chosen to cover our own living expenses via accumulated savings from our earlier careers and other outside sources of funding so that we freed up more of the donor funds to spend on others. In addition, we have often kept our living expenses quite low by living on-site and/or by spending significant periods of time overseas when operating certain projects outside of this country. Every decision we've made to reduce our spending has been voluntary, in order to free up more funds for our work, and get more money into the hands of those less fortunate than ourselves.

I.e. you’re not making minimum wage and you adjust your spending to account for things you want to achieve without relying on the minimum wage to adjust for the basics of life. My point exactly.

You and I do not operate on the same principles. At all. I can understand your perspective to a degree, because it was my perspective when I grew up and remains the perspective of many people I know. I very much doubt that you're currently capable of understanding mine.[/spoiler]

Not sure why you think we need to share the same principles???

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Breh really said that housing has become way more affordable recently. That's even worse than the "gas is low as hell" claim.

Because it has.

Cities and builders are working together to expand availability at rates unseen in either of our life times.

This is an issue I follow closely because urbanism is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. You wont win this argument.

How the city of Sacramento found a solution to California’s affordable housing crisis

Rents in Sacramento are falling faster than any other large city in California, even as it remains the most popular relocation destination in the country.

www.sfchronicle.com

Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

A promising new program shows the way to mass produce unsubsidized housing that’s affordable to the middle class

benjaminschneider.substack.com

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-housing-availability-rate-slips-second-quarter-2023-08-02/

Housing market update: Will new spike in supply push home prices down?

Despite a surge in new listings, high mortgage rates and low inventory levels may keep home prices elevated through spring.

www.newsweek.com

US unions target the housing affordability crisis as their ‘biggest issue’

Organized labor across the country is now setting its sights on housing costs as rents and mortgages continue to soar

www.theguardian.com

℃ertifed, your entire Gish Gallop can be summarized in a single ideological difference between us. You desire large stratification of income and resources, and hope that it continues. I wish for much less stratification of income and resources, and support policies that reduce such.

I don’t desire it, but I’m not going to lock myself into a doom loop of single policy outcomes or interpret what the minimum wage is supposed to accomplish simply because you change the number it represents.

You claim that my desire to increase the purchasing power of the poor is "voodoo economics", which is absolutely bizarre. If the poor have more money, then there is more economic incentive to meet their demands, and they become more competitive for every resource. That's not voodoo economics, that's among the most straightforward economic truths possible.

The poor aren’t supposed to have more money. They’re supposed to have their money do more things.

But you shrugged off inflation so I dont really think you care about the poor so…

you’re chasing your tail here

You, on the other hand, claim the better option is to decrease the cost of literally every essential resource without actually changing the governing system of economics at all. This will obviously fail for three major reasons.

Yeah because you can’t inflate your way out of poverty. You have to change what having a little bit of money means for those with a little bit of money.

1. It is far more difficult to significantly decrease the cost of every essential good than it is to increase the income of a single disadvantaged subgroup. There are many examples of a single law immediately increasing the wages of poor workers on a large scale. There are no examples of us ever systematically reducing the price and increasing availability of housing, food, transport, health care, quality education, and legal assistance simultaneously.....or even over a longer timeframe, for that matter.

Thats

Too

Damn

Bad.

Get to work. The housing crisis hasn’t been met by people sitting around. They moved to indicate how zoning affects lives and how housing stocks convert between and change communities while showing that the fears of NIMBYs claiming people are gentrifiers was unfounded and caused more harm.

Oh, and China has housing thats so cheap they can’t even get people to live in them, yet, and they overbuilt to the point they can’t pay any of it back. So yeah, you can reduce the price that much. You literally are ignoring present reality to argue some weird point about income.

2. Even if you successfully decreased the cost of goods, if you haven't changed the relative purchasing power of the poor, then you're ensuring they will continue to get fukked.

I don’t care about this. Poor people already have a little money and because I’ve shown you multiple times that most people dont make minimum wage that the only way to combat low but not minimum wage is improving the access to education and resources an opportunities to increase the income of those individuals through market means or finding ways to be more valuable. Government can’t catch everyone who falls here. It’ll never be able to. Thats why you need better infrastructure to stretch how far the dollar goes.

You said this was too hard. Well, dont be poor then. You seem to not be interested in big projects as Mr. Revolutionar.y

Even if the absolute cost of certain resources is reduced, the relative purchasing disparity will remain, so the rich will still leverage their outsized power in the economy to hoard resources and social access and ensure that what the poor get is the worst of what is available.

Yea? And?

Even if housing is cheaper, the poor will still be in the worst housing.

Yea?

Even if education is cheaper, the poor will still get the worst education.

Educational funding is often linked to tax bases. This is why suburbs are increasingly becoming poor as people move back to cities…this is why you either need denser housing availability AND ways to move education funding away from property taxes!

Again, minimum wage won’t fix this.

Even if health care is cheaper, the poor will still get the worst health care. The best lawyers, doctors, teachers, childcare programs, etc. will flow to where the money is, and the poor will gets the leftovers.

Yes, nothing is perfect. We know.

Their homes will still be in the places with the worst pollution, worst crime, worst social access. Because you haven't closed the economic power gap at all, the gaps in the relative quality of access will remain large.

We’re far afield of minimum wage here. Plus you said addressing this stuff was too hard so we need to give the morphine needle of inflated dollars to satiate the poor

3. Worst of all, your ideas will never work out because you create ZERO ongoing political incentive to carry them out. If the poor remain financially poor, then we all know that policies to help the poor will NEVER be consistently implemented.

OK, so we shouldn’t do anything. Got it.

Even if one enlightened administration improves affordable housing, the next one in the pockets of the rich will scale it right back. Even if one administration improves public transport, the next can take it all away. Someone will increase taxes to improve education access for the poor, and the moment a recession hits, the rich clamor for those taxes to be halved and the funding is destroyed.

You’re so revolutionary you dont even have solutions.

This is amazing.

Poor people have less and the way we make being poor less of a burden is to provide things in society to make being poor less of a burden…a stunning concept.

You and I full well know that so long as the poor lack money, their desires drive nothing.

Why should their desires drive anything? Again, I said what I’d provide to allow those passions to be directed into more useless or guarded ends and you shrugged it off as too hard and said the looming rich would keep taking advantage…well…yeah? The point is to make it less of a burden, not remove it completely.

Again, doing and earning the least amount possible will always make things tight. As it should.

Services for the poor as distributed via government only improve to the degree that the wealthy at that particular time feel compassionate and willing to help them. The moment any outside circumstance reduces that temporary compassion, the services for the poor are reduced as well. That is the state of the problem, and that can ONLY change by either rejecting capitalism as a governing principle, or by increasing the economic power of the poor relative to everyone else. I prefer the first option, but am willing to settle temporarily for the second.

You aren't willing to do either, and instead just wave your hands around promising bullshyt while knowing full well that nothing you say will ever deliver anything more than the status quo.

Capitalism is the only thing building more housing right now and converting offices into new housing, FYI

This hand-waving of being anti-capitalist isn’t an answer and the fact is that you never are interested in manifesting the burden of your convictions into tangible, real world policy that can fail in the real world so you keep masking this is utopian pontificating. Yes, nothing will ever allow everyone to be helped, therefore it’s pointless to try. You like many leftists dont actually think you’ll ever accomplish anything so you’re more comfortable indicating what the problem is rather than addressing it. This allows you to deny any attempts at fixing the issue as insufficient. You can’t handle the responsibility of accountability.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

This is disingenuous as fukk. You've already admitted that your system REQUIRES low-paid unskilled laborers to function. You can't just magically transfer the entire population into "skilled labor", and you full well know that - if you trained up everyone, then who would do all the jobs that you don't want to pay a living wage to?

Seems like you proved my point. You can’t force people to pay wages for values that aren’t there on margins that dont exist. This is why you need a society that costs less to live in, not by artificially inflating the incomes of those who cant generate those wages themselves. Even populist conservatives know this now.

Not to mention that we haven't actually offered our disadvantaged populations the slightest move towards better "skills, education, opportunity, and resources" in the last 50 years. Both Republicans and Democrats have used that mantra to claim that's how they'd lift people out of poverty, but in reality we've seen inequality GROW for almost my entire lifetime, low-end education quality stagnate, and opportunity become even more out of reach. Economic mobility in America is far worse now than it was in previous generations, and you offer nothing to change that.

OK, so you’re not interested in attacking or improving this outcome, only indicating the extent we’ve come up short.

Yeah, it's definitely clear that you don't know what equalizing access means.

Another definition game youre playing. Let me guess, only you know what this term/phrase means and that unless used how you want it used, then you’ll score this as some other argument “win"

You dont even argue. You shadowbox and claim you’ve won the Olympics after a few rounds.

As if our system is based on any real measure of "providing value".

OK, move to Havana?

There are highly-regarded economic papers demonstrating that preschool teachers provide an insane amount of value....yet that is one of the lowest-paid professions in the country. I think the average childcare provider provides far more value than the average political scientist - but the political scientist is always going to get paid much more.

This is why I support government paying for early childhood education vouchers or building those centers…you get more out of that than just raising the minimum wage to account for that, which often goes to those who dont have kids or are young or unskilled.

We need people who are using these services to actually get the benefit of these services.

The construction workers who build a home have provided much more value than the landlord who uses his access to capital to buy that home in a downturn and then rent it out (or flip it at a profit) when the market moves up.

Well, yes. Thats how large scale projects are completed. You’re against even creating more housing through any means including big developers with deep pockets

Home health aides provide a hell of a lot more value for individual lives than jewelry dealers do - yet the person dealing jewelry is living large, while the home health aide makes minimum wage.

Because jewelry isn’t a basic necessity of life. DO I need to explain this?????

This is like claiming Uber Eats/Door Dash is too expensive while ignoring that thats a LUXURY.

Also, construction workers dont make minimum wage

How does any particular restaurant's cook provide less value than any particular firm's bonds trader, other than the fact that such traders are part of the power structure that has artificially gamed the setup of the economy to incentivize what they do, regardless of whether it is beneficial to society?

The bond trader provides the liquify to the restaurant owner to invest the capital to create that restaurant, and you’re just projecting random bad bankers onto the entire economy.

If you want to deincentive individual economic actors, you allow government to nationalize what its accountable for

Again, this has nothing to do with the minimum wage.

Every single farm laborer provides an essential, valuable service for our population, and works hard as fukk under terrible conditions to do so. Can you make the same claim of every stockbroker?

We’re not talking about minimum wage anymore

Look up what an EMT makes. Look up what an emergency dispatcher makes. Look up what a social worker makes. Then compare that to the salaries made by realtors, by advertizers, by all sorts of consultants and administrators who know how fukking superfluous they are.

None of these people make minimum wage

I wanted to highlight and bold all of those because those are the exact professions you're shytting on and telling them they don't deserve to make a living wage because they don't have value. I happen to think that what they do has a lot more value than what some of y'all do.

None of them make minimum wage

They are all skilled individuals who deserve to have their money go farther, not to have incomes artificially inflated that will just inflate the incomes of everyone else

Your bullshyt assumptions about some sort of meritocratic system of distributing wages are just that - pure bullshyt. Minimum wage earners don't earn less than capitalists because they provide less value.

They fundamentally provide less value, which is why they’re making the absolute legal minimum amount of money

They earn less because they work in occupations which have never have the power to demand higher wages for themselves. The incentives in the system are fukked up, and only a Status Quo Warrior like yourself could pretend to be blind to that.

You mentioned a bunch of people who dont make minimum wage, which this convo is about.