Is the concept of a livable wage flawed?

should there be no minimum wage at all?

bring back slavery

no thats gay

pretty gay desu

It's weird how that exactly sort of thing has happened to me before. I've ordered the fish burger at McDonalds and they squirt a really small piece of the sauce in one corner of the burger. It's likely seriously how fucking hard is this?
I guess to their credit they probably just don't give a shit.

You retards who are against the minimum wage rising end up paying their salaries anyway. They don't make enough money to survive on their own so they end up going on welfare to survive, you pay for their housing and food. Corporations are too cheap to pay their employees a livable wage so they make you subsidize their paychecks. Congrats, you're getting jewed.

The concept of a livable wage is not "flawed," but the understanding of what is a livable wage is.
Most people think a "livable wage" means a comfortable existence with access to most of the fancy toys. This is false. One does not need cable, internet, or cellphones to live. One needs shelter, food, and clothing to live. Anything else above that is perks. However, everyone insists that everyone needs a 2b2b apartment at minimum rather than living in a 1b1b studio.
Also, a "livable wage" is impossilbe in both a capitalist system and a communist system. Communism is obvious, capitalism is because we don't actually have any value to our money, it is nothing but glorified debt, kept flowing by people going into debt further. No wage will ever be enough to live on and buy someone out of debt.
If we replaced the ecomomy with a monetary system based on labor, not debt, and removed usury, we could rapidly reach a point where almost any wage would become a livable wage, especially if we taught people what it was to live, rather than to be entertained by spending money they don't have on things they don't need.

>t. commie who doesn’t own a business

Who the fuck eats fish with cheese you fucking animals. You don't deserve a living wage if you eat that shit.

You make some good arguments against welfare.

nigger detected

Then the minimum wage employees end up committing crime to stay alive, so you end up paying for their prison time. Like it or fucking not, you're going to pay for their livelihood until corporations pay them enough to survive.

>has never had tuna nachos

you make a good argument against feeding prisoners

You sir, are the nigger. Fish and cheese are enemies. Fish is fresh, should be eaten with things that accent freshness, cheese is aged and pungent, should not be added to fish.

This

>t. some lactose intolerant nigger

if you really want to benifit low wage workers without impacting the entire work force and small businesses than a higher standard deduction is the real solution. Bump it up to the poverty line, which I believe, is currently around $20k a year. Anyone living in poverty should not be paying income taxes. Period.

What is the alternative, though? If the government doesn't force companies to pay their employees a living wage, what are we supposed to do? Allow them to starve in the street?

Back in the heyday of this country, the biggest employer was General Motors and the average employee earned about $35 an hour. Today, the biggest employer in this country is WalMart and the average employee earns about $8 an hour. When your average employee earning $35 an hour, the middle class was the strongest it had ever been in this country and every metric of their standard of living was far better regarding savings, health coverage, college for their children, ect.

I don't know, if it worked to un-fuck this country back then, I don't know why it wouldn't un-fuck this country now.

>Does a bird shit white?

>Does giraffe have a long neck?

>Does the sun shine so bright that it penetrates my soul?

>Does my butthole clinch when I see something cringe?

If you’ve answered yes to all these questions congratulations you’re hired.

Damn it Cletus, go home!

The filet o' fish tartar sauce comes in a tube exactly like a tube of caulk. If you only got a tiny dab of sauce it means that that was the last squirt out of the tube and the employee was too lazy to grab a new tube and give you the proper amount. Also, filet o fish are gross.

lol theres also a lot more people in the US, and we import them legally and illegally constantly.

Stop bringing in people to do jobs for cheap and driving down prices of labor, and the middle class will do better.

>he can't survive on 7 to 9 dollars an hour
Learn to frugal newfag. Once you finally get that comfy 14.88 job working for the state, you'll be even more Jewish than the Commies with your money.

I'm not sure a minimum *livable* wage makes sense. I'd rather subsidize your education and health care and day care and really whatever else the fuck it takes for you to become someone more valuable to society ("valuable" here means the goods and services you can provide, not some moral quandry about what the real worth of a person is).

$15/hr is what we'll have in January 2019 in Ontario. I got $6.85 when I earned minimum wage as a highschooler and it was clear as day to me that I'd never want to subsist on that (because it was literally impossible). But now minimum wage is sold as being something you should be able to live comfortably on... fuck that. It shouldn't be presented as anything other than a temporary job that you are using to get some basic dosh and experience while training for something far better.

Your entire post shows a willingness to solve the problem, but not the knowledge needed.
GM didn't unfuck the country by paying everyone a $35/hour wage. And our current system of international capitalism prevents that from happening anyways.
Here's the solution: Ban international manufacturing and insist that American companies hire American workers. Restricts international trade to goods for goods, rather than money for goods. Nationalize and disband companies like Walmart, Target, etc, and allow them to be replaced with locally owned shops who provide those goods and services instead.
This will prevent the outsourcing of labor, the flooding of the market with cheaply made imported goods that put american businesses out of business, and will return economic power back to people rather than corporations who exploit locals into poverty rather than letting them build themselves up into wealth.

>>Does the sun shine so bright that it penetrates my soul?
but you don't have a soul
also, checked

There should be no price/wage controls.

Too many minorities that can't hold a job that GM would be able to give them. In addition consider that most companies don't even want to hire Americans when they can get 3rd worlders to make the product and just ship it to america instead. On top of that democrats don't want people out of welfare or to rise up out of poverty, because that's where part of their votes comes from. Republicans don't want to actually choose any big companies to help they would rather be courted like a girl for the prom, not saying democrats don't do the same but for this specific thing that would be the republicans major hurdle. On top of everything, is there even enough of a market for GM or these other giants to sell more products? If they suddenly had 10x the workforce wouldn't the supply be way too high?

You are correct in theory, but take into account that $10/hr equates to $20k a year earnings. A single childless adult will be earning 'too much' to qualify for assistance with that wage.

>Also, filet o fish are gross.
They really are, user. So tell me why I eat them so often. I don't understand my own depraved nature.

>system based on labor
How would you quantify labor?

only landowners should be able to vote, start at 50 acres

Wrong. I love cheese. You guys just have shit taste and know nothing about food pairings.

Research and develop an electrical device that attaches to the body and monitors the amount of energy exerted over a period of an hour, this will be called their labor per hour. Pay person accordingly.

Do you honestly think of that could or would ever happen? Wouldn't it be far easier and much more realistic to just raise the minimum wage?

For example, let's look at our biggest employer: WalMart. WalMart brings in 500 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. They can't bump minimum wage up to a place where their employees don't have to rely on food stamps and have money to set aside for their children, savings, and retirement?

>job that you are using to get some basic dosh and experience while training for something far better.

Except the problem with that is the job market is getting smaller due to automation while the workforce gets larger thanks to (((immigration))). The number of jobs is finite. Not everyone can work a high paying career. There arent enough of them to go around. The rest are stuck with low wage service jobs.

Increasing the standard deduction to the poverty line is the real solution. That way low wage workers will pay no income tax and the entire economy wont be impacted negatively.

STOP ASKING FOR CHEESE ON THE SIDE IF YOU DONT WANT CHEESE ON THE SIDE

Only retard here is you, we end up paying for it regardless.
>Cap minimum wage, welfare rises we pay for it
>Raise minimum wage, business owners and corporations raise prices + cut staff, we pay for it

Fundamental problem is we live in a society where you need to able to provide desirable goods and services to exchange for goods and services you want. Lots of people stuck in minimum wage slavery don't have these skills. You can't fix this problem unless you teach them the fucking skills they need. Instead of paying more out of my pocket whether its for welfare or transfer my wealth to them through minimum wage hikes id rather my money go towards teaching them the skills society wants them to have.

My walmart has like 10 employees milling about doing nothing at all times while most of the customers just use self checkout. Minimum wage increases is just making it seem like the value of the services and goods min wagies provide is worth more than it is, and doing that shit NEVER ends well. But you can't ever say that because muh feefees

pic a job for a baseline, say repairing all the infrastructure in the USA. Figure out what the most common labor in that job is, then set your wage for that X Dollars for 1 hour of that job completing a reasonable amount of work. Pick goods you will need for said job, like concrete, and set a base price for X amount that is used in an hours work.
So say that your average worker can lay five hundred pounds of concrete in a road in 1 hour. You pay that worker $20 and you pay $500 for the concrete. And then you let the system work, where people will base the price of goods off of what that man can afford to pay. The system will ultimately correct itself.
The biggest thing you have to do though is get rid of usury. The system will not correct so long as wages can be artificially inflated through debt.

Yes and yes or it should be set low.

>General Motors and the average employee earned about $35 an hour.

>your subjective opinion is objectively incorrect

what did reddit mean by this?

So we need to basically get rid of people. Less to feed, less to house, less to have medical bills. We should turn the world into a wilderness with far out scattered very small villages and towns, and a handful of large cities.

To be honest this is a moral argument, if I was a business owner I'd rather employ two people paying them a living wage than to employ four people and now I'm cheating them.

Same fucking post five days a week. Clearly blue sharia. Sage like a motherfucker

$1.75 in 1957 is equivalent to about 15 dollars in today's money, so that sounds completely reasonable.

Watch a Milton Friedman video on youtube it explains all you need to know on why a living wage and minimum wages are bad for everybody

It did happen, that's how I know it could happen.

As for raising the minimum wage, that does nothing. All you're doing is causing inflation and devaluing the dollar. The worth of goods remains constant, but the price you pay for goods goes up or down based on if you have more or less money floating around. A candy bar used to cost $0.05. Now it costs $1. Did the value of a candy bar change, or did the value of money?
Walmart brings in 500 billion a year...of which most of it is actually debt being paid off to investors. Taking from my example, basically when you buy a candybar, you're buying $0.05 worth of candy and $0.95 worth of debt. The government goes into debt to print money, you go into debt to have money, you're paid with other people's debt to pay your debts, and companies are paid with debt to pay off their debts either for bank loans or investors. No amount of "raising the minimum wage" is going to solve that problem, it's only going to increase the amount of debt that has to be borrowed to float around. And then when you go to buy a candy bar it's $2 and you're still buying only $0.05 worth of candy.
And even if walmart did raise their wage, some other company willing to do it cheaper and show off a better "bottom line" (i.e. collect on debt) would come along, take over walmart's spot, and everyone would probably be worse off because now they're still being paid $8/hour but because you raised the wage walmart had to pay, everything costs base on people earning $16/hour, which means even more poverty.
Raising wages is not the solution.

...

That makes no sense

>That way low wage workers will pay no income tax and the entire economy wont be impacted negatively.
This isn't a terrible step to take. Its one of the reasons why I might be voting for Doug Ford.

>Not enough jobs
There aren't enough low skill labor jobs sure. Thus the training to do something else that society wants.

This is probably how the central planners in good old Communistan thought. The only way to quantify labor is useful output.

fascist, not communist, and it worked great for the nazis.
the point is you're paying for goods and labor for money to flow into small business capitalism, not demanding goods and labor and the rationing based on that.

Hopefully one day I'll be able to make $15/hr

wal mart has downsized their management structure so severely in the past month that I can't imagine ever wanting to work for them for any reason

That's true. I feel bad for the people in those positions who need to find something else within the company or another job entirely.

Why not?

Guaranteed Job
Guaranteed housing
Guarenteed Food.

If there was some sort of regulation of standards like with animals, indentured servatude might be a legitimate choice.

The alternative is to keep growing and growing, 10 billion, 20 billion, 100 billion people until all the land is plastered with high density high rises and we eventually run out of resources on planet earth.

...

2-3 billion max would be ideal.

Labor theory of value is pretty fucking communist desu
It doesn't stop being a commie idea just because you tweak it to fit into your dirigismic worldview

I don't understand what your argument even is. So, WalMart makes more money than God, but they use it all to pay off debt? Is that why they can't increase the minimum wage? And if they DID increase minimum wage, some other company would do everything cheaper and take over WalMart's position, but since everyone is making more money and they're paying cheaper wages, everyone collectively suffers? If the price of those goods rose as minimum wage rose, why wouldn't it fall back down as wages fall back down?

I don't understand anything about how all this debt bullshit works or if it's even true, but I find it very hard to believe that a company who pulls in as much as WalMart doesn't keep a dime of it and spends all of it paying off "investors". And even if they did, fuck it, so what? Pay your debt off slower and pay your employers more, they're able to afford inhalers for their kids and don't have to eat macaroni and cheese every night and could probably afford a more fuel-efficient vehicle and put a little aside for a rainy day and your "investors" are still getting paid off, just not as quickly as they would like it which seems completely fair.

hopefully someone corrects me if my maths is off
basically they make 500 billion revenue. but after expenses which include salary they are at $22 billion profit so using the following lazy algorithm
(amount of people on minimum wage) x ($7 dollar increase) x (30 hours a week) x (50 weeks a year) = increase in salary expenses

1 m on minimum wage 1,000,000 * 7 *30 * 50 = 10.5 billion
2 m on minimum wage 2,000,000 * 7 * 30 * 50 = 21 billion
3 m on minimum wage 3,000,000 * 7 * 30 * 50 = 31.5 billion
obviously it doesn't take in to account actual average hours work per week/year it gives a bit of an idea of what a $15 min wage does.
personally i cant stand the limits big companies go for that last bit of profit but I also see jobs like this to be low tier and if we can use these jobs as jump board to bigger and better things

If their labor isn't fucking worth a livable wage, then why should their employer pay them that much?

This is the one of the few arguments you really need to shit on any conservashit. The state picks up the slack because when people don’t get enough to survive, the will vote accordingly. The inevitable outcome will be socialism and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Just have to play the waiting game for now.

greed and corruption
the only way to get by is to steal
whats the point in raising minimum wage? everything else goes up with it

This is what I absolutely love about discussions regarding economics: When you take an INCREDIBLY simple problem such as minimum wage and you say "Okay, the problem is very simple: They either don't make enough to make ends meet or barely break even and have nothing in saving should shit hit the fan and this is all caused by the fact that they don't make enough money. So, let's pay them more money."

"NOPE NOT GONNA HAPPEN ITS GONNA MAKE EVERYTHING A BILLION TIMES FUCKING WORSE IF WE PAY THEM MORE"

"Okay, but the asshole who owns the company has 145 billion dollars just to himself and his family, could he give some of that up to help the people he's employing?"

"NOPE HERE'S A GARGANTUAN AMOUNT OF GRAPHS AND EQUATIONS PROVING THAT PAYING PEOPLE MORE MONEY DOES NO GOOD AND FUCKS EVERYTHING UP FOR THE REST OF US"

"Okay, so we just stay where we are now? Can't make ends meet or barely breaking even? Either we all collectively live in shit or we don't live at all? Isn't that what communism was supposed to do to us?"

I have a retarded Sup Forums tier idea.

No tax on up to $1 million per person and $10 million net profit per business located in the United States. 60% tax on all income above this regardless of job, political position, or location of residence/headquarters.

Prices would plummet overnight, citizens would be preferred over illegals, big businesses would pay better wages and hire more people, small businesses would be largely unaffected, insurance and other benefits/incentives would be encouraged by employers, outsourcing would stop, monopolies and "too big to fail" would break up or fall, government would be funded, America would return to self-sufficiency, and 99% of whatever race/affiliation you could think of would be absolutely btfo.

honestly if you give them food and shelter and a smartphone most people would opt for it

we probably agree on most things but i don't think it is a simple problem. it would be hard to go up to a board of directors and be like look everyone gets $15 but we are gonna lose half of our profit. without suggesting some kind of incentive that would help shareholders and the business. they just raised to $11 so they are slowly on the way.

Contribute to society if you leftists want a piece of the American Pie. No handouts.

No if there was no minimum wage and no taxes I could hire people to do shit ALL the fucking time, I hate boomers so fucking much

>Fundamental problem is we live in a society where you need to able to provide desirable goods and services to exchange for goods and services you want.
That's not a "problem" it's the meaning of life.

>Is the concept of a livable wage flawed?
Walmart gives out info on how to milk gibs out of the government because they do not pay enough for a person to survive on. So instead of paying an extra couple bucks at walmart so they can pay their employee, you give a couple thousand to the government so so 15 people can decide how to best give your money to that employee.

I'm not saying you're wrong about anything at all, I'm just saying that's what I love about these types of discussions: You point out the problem, you propose the obvious solution, and there's a gargantuan heap of literature telling us that it would never work and wouldn't be fair to anyone involved.

Then you ask how it's fair that the owner of said company makes 500 times more than his employees and it's just fucking crickets.

You wanna pay regular people more money? You're going to have a flood of data thrown at you telling you how it's not fair and will make everything worse for everyone. You wanna know why it's fair that 400 Americans own more wealth than 150 million Americans and why that isn't making things worse for everyone? Fucking crickets.

Look, in some strange way, I'm sure all the math does check out and that it's financially not the answer or the solution, it just rubs me the wrong way that the income gap is THIS FUCKING HUGE and there's no actual way to fix it because the only thing that would fix it is paying people more, but some group of nerds somewhere said that would make everything worse and wouldn't be fair, so we can't do that.

>They can't bump minimum wage up to a place where their employees don't have to rely on food stamps and have money to set aside for their children, savings, and retirement?
Why should Walmart give a fuck about you? Walmart cares about Walmart. They pay you the least amount of money they can get away with, and you take the most amount of money you can get away with.

Why do communists not understand basic economics?

>We have a worse level of income inequality than some countries in Africa, we should do something about this
>FUCKING COMMUNIST!

Never change, Sup Forums.

>giving a flying fuck about inequality

kys, reddit

yea i get what ya saying im just doing devil advocate shit.
I know it seems out of wack that one person can earn more then a worker. but in cases like amazon, microsoft, apple these people started the company and grew it to worldwide enterprise. without gates, bezos and jobs / woz there would not be that huge industry that employees millions and makes your country stronger.

can earn so much more then a worker*

increase in salary would only help so much.
at the end of the day if we treated our immediate family members like dynasty we could buy a house, get some investments pass it on to the next generation. hope they aren't a bunch of degenerate drug addicts and they continue the family fortune. that would start making it more healthy if the bottom 50% at least owned 30% of the wealth.

There is no problem. Whoever told you the world is fair, or that the world should be fair, was a liar. I get to make however much money I can make, whether it's fair to you or not. If I own a company I can choose to pay the employees whatever the fuck I want, and they can choose to work for me or not based on their own interests.
Whether or not it's fair that I have so much doesn't change the fact that I have it. It's mine. It does not matter if you think I earned it. Unearned property is still property.

It makes no difference to you whatsoever how much wealth someone else has. Provide for yourself and your prosperity, grow in whatever ways you can, take whatever advantages you can find, and then die. Welcome to life.

This is the one of the few arguments you really need to shit on any conservashit.
That's because the argument IS shit.
No minimum wage brings down the prices on anything. When the government artificially inflates peoples buying power with welfare prices go up.

You want a living wage? Remove all government intervention and remove the minimum wage. Everyone else's spending power will go up as a result and everything stays the same for the poor anyway.

Of course, the only way this works is if you concede that unskilled labor is not worth very much, and those that can only do unskilled labor will never be able to afford the nicest things. But if all you want is "a living wage" then they'll easily get that.

Also you need to remove illegal Mexicans who also drive wages down.

Long post, but is correct
Subsidizing the bottom undercuts the middle

It's about elevating everyone to the same weak buying power
It's about getting the unwashed masses to become debt saturated

It increases the GDP (makes us look wealthy) while funneling the interests into the (((right pockets)))

High quality post. Stop feeding the animals.

That's great, but there's a big, gigantic problem: We all live together in the same economy. Consumer spending accounts for about 70% for all of our economic growth. If you allow these companies to give into the pressure to please their shareholders by driving wages and benefits down and allowing the middle class to sink further and further into poverty, you're fucking up our economy.

>We all live together in the same economy
You mean we all compete together in the same economy.

>Consumer spending accounts for about 70% for all of our economic growth.
I'm not the economy. It growing does not necessarily benefit me. I don't give a good goddamn how well you are doing. You buying an iphone does not benefit me.

>. If you allow these companies to give into the pressure to please their shareholders
I don't have the moral authority to allow someone to do or not do something with their own property. It's theirs, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it. It exists to please them.

>allowing the middle class to sink further and further into poverty,
If your wealth depends on someone else you made bad life choices.

>somehow the pic doesnt consider the fact that the person is doing it literally because theyre not being paid 15 an hour

I just want to know why niggers can not get the cheese on the center of the sandwich, it is not that hard. When you walk into a store or restaurant you can tell the service is going to be bad by how many niggers work there. I don't think I have ever had good service when its mostly niggers. If its just one or two it might be ok. Asians and Mexicans seem to be good at it.. maybe they were just built for the restaurant industry

Shouldnt the minimum wage rise with inflation?

If your wage isn’t adjusted for inflation you’re actually getting a pay cut.

>don't make enough money to survive on their own so they end up going on welfare to survive
>get a job off the books making 30 grand a year tax free and collect welfare and the rest of the all gibs. Pop out some babies -get some more gibs.

That's supposed to be the idea, but it doesn't keep up.

have you ever walked through a wal-mart or McDonalds and watched the people working. I cant see how anyone of them could deserve the current minimum wage. There are people who are even to shitty for those jobs.. what should be done about them.

This. Some people are just not competent enough to be worth enough to survive off of.

Fuck off, housing is so expensive because of stupid commies like you that want constant regulating of businesses.
Food is easily affordable, it's just that people want to spend 20 dollars on lunch and dinner everyday.

>You retards who are against the minimum wage rising end up paying their salaries anyway. They don't make enough money to survive on their own so they end up going on welfare to survive, you pay for their housing and food. Corporations are too cheap to pay their employees a livable wage so they make you subsidize their paychecks. Congrats, you're getting jewed.

it would be easier to just gulag and shoot them for working too slow now that you mention it

>I like taking it in the ass and vomit stained boots
A true slave. Congratulations.

true

FoF was created because McD was losing money on Fridays in Catholic areas. It's the go to burger of those of the true faith

I hate to say it but maybe encouraging more entrepreneurs to start new businesses might be the solution. Stop thinking like an employee, start something, and maybe you'll be able to/need to hire someone more weak willed than you some day.