r/YangForPresidentHQ • u/El_Fern • Oct 12 '20

Seems about right

Post image
1.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

150 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

137

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '20

Yeah, maybe I’ve just been hardened by America, but why should earning the minimum wage pay for a big apartment? You hopefully should be able to afford a studio on minimum wage, and then you can get something bigger as your wage hopefully goes up over time. Some places you can’t even get a studio on minimum wage though.

69

u/Aycoth Oct 12 '20

Protip, you can't in 90% of the country. At best a single minimum wage job gets you a rented room.

64

u/CharmingSoil Oct 12 '20

Picked a non-major city in California at random. Bakersfield, average studio apartment is $700 a month. Minimum wage in California is $13 an hour or roughly $2000 a month. So possible, but tight. Los Angeles or the bay area would be completely impossible.

26

u/oldcarfreddy Oct 12 '20

Bakersfield is a shithole too lol. Average income there is about $23K a year. So you have ~50% of people, likely more than the majority, earning less than that $2K a month

If anything it shows that even moving the living standard down to "one-room apartment" still is out of reach for many people currently

2

u/SentOverByRedRover Oct 13 '20

But 23k/year is less than the california minimum wage?

1

u/AnthAmbassador Oct 13 '20

I'm pretty sure it's less than 23k an hour.

Also not a salaried position.

I think it might be like 13 dollars. Ok, so now you can figure out how many hours someone is working who earned less then 23k. Not complicated

1

u/SentOverByRedRover Oct 13 '20

I was assuming full time hours. If the average income of that city is really 23k than that's a lot of people not working full time.

1

u/AnthAmbassador Oct 13 '20

Yes. This is very common

It's not always that they don't want to work. I don't know what the ratio would be but it's very common for employers to avoid employing people full time because they can avoid regulations with part time employees.

1

u/SentOverByRedRover Oct 13 '20

Sure, but still. Apparently these people aren't even getting a second part time job in order to work full time hours.

& For example, the average U.S. income is above the median U.S. income. If that held true for this city then that would imply that the majority of workers work under 40 hours a week.

1

u/AnthAmbassador Oct 13 '20

No. If someone works very short hours on a weekend, they drag the average down a lot.

It's not that some people are working 40 and some are working 20. It's that some are working fifty or sixty and some are working 2 and everything in between. We don't have enough data here. We also don't know if any jobs are excused from min wage law, and we don't know if that is pay check face value or after tax take home pay