I understand what you are saying Sheila, and I am not unsympathetic to it either. Whether one can subsist on minimum wage as a single person really depends on what part of the country one lives in and what one considers 'living'. But regardless of what we think is the absolute minimum wage people should earn, labor is still only worth what the market will bear. You force employers to pay more in order to hire anybody, fine. But you shut more and more people out of the entry level jobs market and force them into being subsidized by others. And you force prices higher so that the cheap apartment is less cheap as are the utilities and food and clothing.
Both my husband and I come from rather humble circumstances and we went through a number of paycheck to paycheck years in which the money ran out well ahead of the weekend in a lot of weeks. We hated poverty. Loathed it. And resented it. We didn't like it so much we were determined to do whatever we had to do to get out of it. So we did. We did that by making our labor/contribution to our employers, worth much more than minimum wage.
Had somebody paid us to be poor, would we have pulled ourselves out of the mess we were in? If we had been paid a 'living wage' to do those minimum wage jobs, would we have made the effort to learn marketable skills that were worth much more? I don't know. I know a whole lot of people don't.
Foxy, I love you, but when you made minimum wage, it bought a lot more than it does today. It's a lot easier to work your way up when you can afford a roof over your head AND community college classes, than when you can't even afford a roof over your head.
I love you too babe, but minimum wage is a number. In Stinnett Texas you can live on it. In Santa Fe NM you cannot. My daughter makes a fantastic salary where she is across the river from the Pentagon in DC. She cannot afford to buy a house there, however. On the same salary here in Albuquerque, she could buy a terrfic home and live very well indeed.
But circumstances change, what we expect as 'normal' changes over the decades, and what we all must do to survive in life changes. I have worked for as little as 60 cents an hour in the college laundry--my first full time job paid $1.00/hour--and I have worked for as much as $100/hour as a consultant (though those jobs were pretty infrequent.) We have earned much less over the years when our buying power was much more--we have made good salaries in places it was difficult to save anytthing.
The thing is no artificial 'living wage' is going to help if it shuts people out of the job market altogether or if it is inflationary to the point that nothing is gained.
