Living on minimum wage, 50s to present

[Wiseacre]

" You are unfamiliar with the sense of entitlement that the moneyed carry, if they arnt collecting a certain margin of profit to justify their risk, they simply shut down, meeting customers needs doesnt factor into it. "

Actually, this is true. You say it like it's a bad thing, if a business isn't producing enough profit to make it worthwhile then he/she is going to take steps to make the enterprise worth the time, effort, and risk to keep it going if they can. That's how you weed out the bad ideas and poor managers, the the diligent ones from the get rich quick crowd. Free enterprise baby, there are winners and losers everyday. That's the way it's supposed to work, why do you think so many businesspeople bust ass for years on end puting all their time and energy into their business? Most of 'em don't quit when things get tough.

Seriously, do you really think a businessperson should stay in business if it isn't turning enough profit? Why? Question: which stocks do you have in your 401k? I'm guessing the ones that make the most money for you. So why is that okay for you but not them?

 

[percysunshine]

Small business, eight employees. My 15 and 3/4 aged son just got a job offer from the owner at minimum wage. He can't wait. He knows he will need the money. Girls..and stuff.

If the government were to force the wage up, the owner could not afford him.

Obama is a moron. Totally clueless. Even more clueless than the average liberal...and they are supremely clueless.

 

[Nika2013]

"Some would like to claim (pretend) that there is some large class of people trying to support a family on minimum wage, but that just isn't reality." (she says)

You might want to check the last census for the rural South and Mid-West as many counties have high numbers of adults making minimum wage...That is why the child poverty rates are so high....

 

[percysunshine]

"Some would like to claim (pretend) that there is some large class of people trying to support a family on minimum wage, but that just isn't reality." (she says)

You might want to check the last census for the rural South and Mid-West as many counties have high numbers of adults making minimum wage...That is why the child poverty rates are so high....

Child poverty rates are due to minimum wages.

I think we should pass a law that everyone will make 1 million dollars a year.

Problem fixed. No more child poverty.

That was easy.

 

[ConHog]

Small business, eight employees. My 15 and 3/4 aged son just got a job offer from the owner at minimum wage. He can't wait. He knows he will need the money. Girls..and stuff.

If the government were to force the wage up, the owner could not afford him.

Obama is a moron. Totally clueless. Even more clueless than the average liberal...and they are supremely clueless.

Its already been proven that the bulk of mw earners are over the age of 25 .

No adul should be earning less than $10/hr. If there isnt value there for the employer, fire them. Simple as that

 

[HomeInspect]

First show me where I said people did not work hard at minimum wage jobs.. My parents were far from perfection, they just had a good work ethic and sense of responsibilty, and tha'ts something I got at my first minimum wage job. Increasing the minimum wage will take small businesses down. I was glad to have a minimum wage job, until I leaned a trade and then got an education. A higher education is not a right, no mare than owning a house or being provivded health care. The mindless "gimmie" mentality strikes again.

 

[HomeInspect]

"Some would like to claim (pretend) that there is some large class of people trying to support a family on minimum wage, but that just isn't reality." (she says)

You might want to check the last census for the rural South and Mid-West as many counties have high numbers of adults making minimum wage...That is why the child poverty rates are so high....

Child poverty rates are due to minimum wages.

I think we should pass a law that everyone will make 1 million dollars a year.

Problem fixed. No more child poverty.

That was easy.

Pay them two million ! Think of the tax revenue to support Obama's spending ! LOL Like most of America's problems.. it's lack of personal responsibility. Soemthing the left can't comprehen.. Child poverty is a direct result of having kids you can't afford. Or should that be a right too.. like health care, owning a house, and getting a college degree ??

 

[editec]

Minimum Wage and What It Buys You: 1950s to Now

Interesting to see what minimum wage bought/buys now.

I SUSPECT if the same analysis was done for ther MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME we'd find much the same trend.

What we'd discover is that the cost of necessities is rising faster than the median incomes of the everybody except about the top 20% or so of incomes.

Naturally the bottom 1/5 is getting hitting harder by inflation and taxes (local mostly) than the rest of us, but the vast majority of Americans are making less (in comparison to costs) and are growing poorer.

 

[kwc57]

$7-$8/hour is pretty much a slave wage. You cant even pay rent in the hood and have enough to eat on that.

CDZ VIOLATION.

How can you get an education making $7 - $8 an hour when tuition to even a state university can run to $15K per year?

Not everyone is university material. There should be jobs which pay a living wage for a family which do not require university education. Those used to be skilled trades, and manufacturing jobs. In economics, I learned that manufacturing and real estate are the keys to wealth. It's certainly working in China.

Canada's minimum wage is $10.25 cents per hour and companies like Wal-Mart have no problem meeting that cost and making a profit.

You either select lower cost community colleges and live at home over state universities or you use something like this.

Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education | Students | Oklahoma's Promise | How It Works

Taxpayers like me who get no break and have to foot the $17K per year bill for my son's college education have to pay for those who can't. Pretty easy to qualify for a free ride. Parents have to make less than $50K per year when the kid is in 8th grade, apply, take a few required classes and maintain a 2.5 GPA. That's it. You do that and the state pays for your education at a community college or the same state university where I'm paying $17K per year for my son.

Safety nets and assitance abounds for those who will put the slightest amount of effort into finding them.

And no, not everyone is university material. Unless you are mentally challenged or just an idiot, you shouldn't be making minimum wage for very long. This was true when I worked for a minimum wage of $1.60 back in the early 70's and when my son did in the last couple of years. For a kid who sticks around and proves he is a good employee, he usually gets a bump in fairly short order. More importantly, he builds a trust with his employer and can ask to use them as a reference when they seek a better job after getting some experience under their belt. For those who don't want to go to a university, there are the technology centers which we used to call vo-tech. They can go there and learn a trade which will pay well above minimum wage.

The bottom line is, if you are an adult, married, have kids and you are trying to live off of minimum wage, you made some really, really BAD decisions in life.

 

[Dragonlady]

This whole "personal responsibility" mantra has gotten out of hand. Poor people have no protections against the downturns in a capitalist economy, nor do they have control of the economic forces that cause these downturns. And free market capitalism increases the volatility in the market so that these financial boom and bust cycles are more frequent.

Friedman's theories have increased poverty, depressed wages and destroyed the middle class in every country where the US and the IMF have imposed market capitalism reforms. The US is no exception. Every country where the free market reigns, has high unemployment, high levels of poverty and no social programs.

Continue on your current path of "personal responsibility", cutting taxes and social programs, and the US will soon cease to be a first world country. You're well on you way now.

 

[Deepbluediver]

Continue on your current path of "personal responsibility", cutting taxes and social programs, and the US will soon cease to be a first world country. You're well on you way now.

The more purely capitalistic a soceity, the more volatile the economy tends to be. The earliest years of the existence of the United States are good evidence of this, as the contry cycled through several exceedingly rapid shifts both up and down. This mellowed out somewhat over the following decades, as government controls where put into place and the lows got less painful but the highs got less rewarding.

I would have less of a problem with an expanded government if it was actually paying for everything they claim to want to provide. The most recent thing I read says that the federal government is borrowing 24 cents out of every dollar it spends. If taxes and all that government support are so good for the economy, then why doesn't the government actually raise taxes that high? Because doing so would crush the economy faster than anything else.
Can you imagine the outcry there would be if some politician said he wanted to raise all taxes by a third?

All the people claiming that the government is doing good by borrowing money, but they seem to forget that this money will need to be paid back, and when it does, it will be revenue that is taken out of the economy and yet we get nothing for it.

I support a REASONABLE amount of spending to have things like social programs and safety nets. So we don't have people starving in the street. When our countries biggest health problem is obesity I think we're officially rich enough to support that. What I don't like when certain groups claim that all the government borrowing, taxation, and spending is the road back to prosperity.

 

[Dragonlady]

I support a REASONABLE amount of spending to have things like social programs and safety nets. So we don't have people starving in the street. When our countries biggest health problem is obesity I think we're official rich enough to support that. What I don't like when certain groups claim that all the government borrowing, taxation, and spending is the road back to prosperity.

Obesity is a result of poor nutrition and a lack of exercise, not too much food. Fattening food is cheap and it's filling. Poor parents feed it to their kids to keep them from being hungry, but it doesn't mean they are well nourished.

I don't claim that government borrowing is the road back to properity, but during economic down times, it is necessary for a government to run a deficit. THIS particular deficit is being fuelled by the high costs of wars, Bush's unfunded expansion of Medicaid, and the effect of the Bush Tax Cuts.

Obama slowed the growth of the deficit, but it's like trying to stop a runaway freight train without having it jump the rails. He's already been criticized for lack of job creation, but when the government or reduced spending, jobs are lost there too and the government has shrunk during this administration, to the point where jobs lost in government have almost offset the jobs gained in the private sector.

The wars are ending, the troops are coming home, and that spending is winding down and should provide an overall reduction in military spending this year. But the US could afford to cut it's military spending by half and still spend more than any other country in the world.

No one ever talks about the high cost of this huge standing army. It's what eventually did in the Romans financially, and it's a huge drain on the US economy. Of course the US economy is thoroughly immeshed in big military spending so that even cutting there would lead to huge job losses.

 

[kwc57]

I support a REASONABLE amount of spending to have things like social programs and safety nets. So we don't have people starving in the street. When our countries biggest health problem is obesity I think we're official rich enough to support that. What I don't like when certain groups claim that all the government borrowing, taxation, and spending is the road back to prosperity.

Obesity is a result of poor nutrition and a lack of exercise, not too much food. Fattening food is cheap and it's filling. Poor parents feed it to their kids to keep them from being hungry, but it doesn't mean they are well nourished.

I don't claim that government borrowing is the road back to properity, but during economic down times, it is necessary for a government to run a deficit. THIS particular deficit is being fuelled by the high costs of wars, Bush's unfunded expansion of Medicaid, and the effect of the Bush Tax Cuts.

Obama slowed the growth of the deficit, but it's like trying to stop a runaway freight train without having it jump the rails. He's already been criticized for lack of job creation, but when the government or reduced spending, jobs are lost there too and the government has shrunk during this administration, to the point where jobs lost in government have almost offset the jobs gained in the private sector.

The wars are ending, the troops are coming home, and that spending is winding down and should provide an overall reduction in military spending this year. But the US could afford to cut it's military spending by half and still spend more than any other country in the world.

No one ever talks about the high cost of this huge standing army. It's what eventually did in the Romans financially, and it's a huge drain on the US economy. Of course the US economy is thoroughly immeshed in big military spending so that even cutting there would lead to huge job losses.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whooooooa.......those became the Obama tax cuts.

BTW, national security is one of the government's constitutional mandates. Entitlement spending is not.

 

[Uncensored2008]

$7.25 an hour is something a teenager in school should be earning, not an adult!

And that is exactly who most minimum wage workers are, teenagers, not adults, not people supporting a family, but teenagers.

Some would like to claim (pretend) that there is some large class of people trying to support a family on minimum wage, but that just isn't reality.

Here in California most minimum wage workers are illegal aliens.

 

[ScienceRocks]

What do you think caused the price of living to become so expensive? O'yesss, fucking with supply and demand.

Our system favors big businesses that don't have to worry about competitention. The market place is good for the super rich but torture small businesses.

 

[Uncensored2008]

What do you think caused the price of living to become so expensive? O'yesss, fucking with supply and demand.

Our system favors big businesses that don't have to worry about competitention

Be aware that the study is a fraud.

By using gas and rent as the guide, a false picture is painted. But even with these cherry picked items, with gas it's 22 minutes in 1950 verses 23 minutes in 2010. (Verses 3 1/2 hours today, Obama Akbar.)

How about we look at how many minutes to buy a 19" color TV? Or a CAR, or a broom, a couch, or thousands of other items that are a tiny fraction of the work required in 1950?

 

[Dragonlady]

I live in a country with a mixed economy, a social democracy. The US experiment with free market capitalism has lead to wealth being transferred to the corporations and the elite, sustained high levels of unemployment, a struggling middle class, and reduced wages the working poor, just like it has in every other country where Friedman's brand of pure capitalism has been attempted.

People on this board decry the number of people on the food stamp program, but then say that a higher minimum wage is impossible. To this I say - BULLSHIT!

American big box retailers pay Canadian minimum wages with no difficulty. Walmart employees in Canada make $10.25 and hour and aren't dependent on food stamps to feed their families. Canadian Walmart stores are very profitable. No one plays games with the employees' house to keep them dependent on government assistance. Canadian Walmart employees don't receive any more government benefits than the employees of any other company.

The myth that businesses will go under if forced to pay higher minimum wages, is just that, a myth.

 

[Deepbluediver]

Obesity is a result of poor nutrition and a lack of exercise, not too much food. Fattening food is cheap and it's filling. Poor parents feed it to their kids to keep them from being hungry, but it doesn't mean they are well nourished.

So what's the solution? I'm not being sarcastic or flippant, I'm actually asking because this is a problem I've thought about msyelf. Do we just ban all unhealthy foods? Put a tax on anything below a certain nutrition level? Hand out military-style MRE's instead of EBT cards?

I don't claim that government borrowing is the road back to properity, but during economic down times, it is necessary for a government to run a deficit.

Why shouldn't the government have a savings account? It's good for individuals and private enterprises, why not for governments?

Oh right, because that would require some politician to actually think more than the next election-cycle ahead, and not either spend all the money or give it away.

THIS particular deficit is being fuelled by the high costs of wars, Bush's unfunded expansion of Medicaid, and the effect of the Bush Tax Cuts.

Obama slowed the growth of the deficit, but it's like trying to stop a runaway freight train without having it jump the rails.

I was trying to keep this from being a political thing, but what effects of the Bush Tax Cuts are you referring too? Federal tax revenues rose between 2003 and 2007. The thing about taxes is, their short and long-term effects are opposites. When you cut them, revenue drops immediately, but eventually the economy grows faster overall, causing revenues to increase. When you increase taxes, revenues jump, but then falter as people seek more loopholes, invest money elsewhere, and economic growth slows.

Also, according to this site (I prefer to post links rather than clog up the thread with huge graphics) federal spending was, is, and will be on the rise for quite some time.

Federal Spending per Household Is Skyrocketing

It's funny, growth is pretty flat during the Clinton/Republican-House years, jump when Bush is elected, fall when he loses the House in 2006, then jumps AGAIN when Obama is elected, and falls after the 2010 elections get the Republicans back in charge of the House.

It's almost like when either party is in complete control they go on a spending binge.
Hmm....

He's already been criticized for lack of job creation, but when the government or reduced spending, jobs are lost there too and the government has shrunk during this administration, to the point where jobs lost in government have almost offset the jobs gained in the private sector.

The federal government (or any government, really) doesn't actually create productive jobs that add to the economy; it creates positions for employees that are paid with taxes on the rest of the economy. Short-term pain, long-term gain, and vice versa.

Also, here's a link I found:
The Fact File - Size of the Federal Workforce: Growth and Stagnation

The number of federal employees looks pretty steady to me. I believe there are have been more cuts in government employees at the state-level, since individual states have less borrowing power than the federal government.

The wars are ending, the troops are coming home, and that spending is winding down and should provide an overall reduction in military spending this year. But the US could afford to cut it's military spending by half and still spend more than any other country in the world.

No one ever talks about the high cost of this huge standing army. It's what eventually did in the Romans financially, and it's a huge drain on the US economy.

When an army is just standing around it's not a problem, it's the shooting wars that get expensive. Also, maintaining an army might have hurt Rome, financially, but it was invaders who finally burnt the city to the ground. So I support trimming any waste we can find in military spending, but pretty much everything else about our society depends on having safety first.

 

[HomeInspect]

Pay them two million ! Think of the tax revenue to support Obama's spending ! LOL Like most of America's problems.. it's lack of personal responsibility. Soemthing the left can't comprehen.. Child poverty is a direct result of having kids you can't afford. Or should that be a right too.. like health care, owning a house, and getting a college degree ??

BULLSHIT!!! This whole "personal responsibility" mantra has gotten out of hand. Poor people have no protections against the downturns in a capitalist economy, nor do they have control of the economic forces that cause these downturns. And free market capitalism increases the volatility in the market so that these financial boom and bust cycles are more frequent.

Friedman's theories have increased poverty, depressed wages and destroyed the middle class in every country where the US and the IMF have imposed market capitalism reforms. The US is no exception. Every country where the free market reigns, has high unemployment, high levels of poverty and no social programs.

Continue on your current path of "personal responsibility", cutting taxes and social programs, and the US will soon cease to be a first world country. You're well on you way now.

Continue on your path of government dependency, and you run out of other people's money. It's all about personal responsiblity. Anyone can be down and need assistance, but how many people have kids they can't afford and expect the tax payers to pay for them? We have become way too dependent on government. Government should be for necessary infrastructure, not a place to go to solve all your problems.

 

[HomeInspect]

CDZ VIOLATION

I live in a country with a mixed economy, a social democracy. The US experiment with free market capitalism has lead to wealth being transferred to the corporations and the elite, sustained high levels of unemployment, a struggling middle class, and reduced wages the working poor, just like it has in every other country where Friedman's brand of pure capitalism has been attempted.

People on this board decry the number of people on the food stamp program, but then say that a higher minimum wage is impossible. To this I say - BULLSHIT!

American big box retailers pay Canadian minimum wages with no difficulty. Walmart employees in Canada make $10.25 and hour and aren't dependent on food stamps to feed their families. Canadian Walmart stores are very profitable. No one plays games with the employees' house to keep them dependent on government assistance. Canadian Walmart employees don't receive any more government benefits than the employees of any other company.

The myth that businesses will go under if forced to pay higher minimum wages, is just that, a myth.

It is the US's free market capitalism that made it the leading world power and a rich country. You may not like what you hear, but Milton Friedman was exactly right.