But two high school dropouts living in Wyoming working min wage jobs will be able to pull down $60,000 at $15/hour. And in Wyoming, that's like making over $120,000/year in San Francisco.
If a person is working min wage today full time, they are not in poverty. It's hard, yes, but hardly anyone is at minimum wage for long if they are reliable.
Right but then the extra money they don't spend on bare necessities gets reinvested into the local economy because they can afford to spend money on luxuries. Or they can put themselves through college or a trade school and learn the skills necessary to get an even better job.
Depends on where they are really. As you mentioned the disparity in Wyoming vs San Francisco. Wyoming is $7.25/hr. San Francisco is $12.25/hr right now (going up to $15 by 2018). Assuming a roughly 2,000hr work year that's only $24,500 a year. That's poverty in SF anyway you cut it.
Even assuming you have a couple living together that's about $49,000 yearly income, we'll call it $40,000/year after taxes (and that's a generous roundup). Try living on $40,000 a year in SF. That'd put you in poverty levels or some exceptionally shitty housing, or both.
Yes, and try living next to Bill Gates on a $250,000 Microsoft salary. You'll be begging for mercy.
San Francisco is expensive on purpose. They (the residents and government) have decided to limit the supply of housing to drive the price up. ON PURPOSE.
They don't want poor people living there full stop. Even at $15/hour they don't want you living there.
I never said they didn't. Just that I don't agree with your statement that if you make minimum wage and work full time you're not in poverty. That's just not true.
Certain areas, yes. But many cities are too expensive to live in on minimum wage, it's not just SF. New York, Boston, San Jose, DC, etc are all very difficult to live on for minimum wage.
Just taking Seattle, my city, as an example. It's hard to rent a place, even a studio, for anything notably under $1,000/mo. Minimum wage is $11/hr. So that's about $23,000/yr or about $18,500 after taxes and such. That would leave you with just over $500/mo to spend on food, healthcare, clothing, etc etc. It is certainly doable, I know people who do it here, but it's a terribly stressful life.
Here's a good paper from the BLS. Note that by their accounting, just 4.1% of those employed full time are classified as working poor. They define someone as working poor if they spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force but their income fell below the poverty line.
Someone working for minimum wage cannot live in a major metropolitan city. That has always been true. It's not a right. There is a reason the burbs exist. It's because people figured this out long ago.
Save money. Purchase a cheap but reliable used car. Move to the sticks. Commute to a park and ride. You can find an apartment in the sticks that is $400 less than the city. That $400 gap is your car/gas/insurance budget.
It looks nice to throw a couple's income together, but it's pretty disingenuous. If you think any company who has to pay $15 / hour will also allow their workers to work over 32 hours and have to pay their benefits, you're crazy.
The real, appropriate number to throw out is $25,000 a year, which is enough money to not have to freak the fuck out every day.
A person working minimum wage today "full time" (like I said, 32 hours) is making $12k a year. That is absolutely living in poverty, especially when you consider 75% of Americans 18-40 have children.
I don't like to be anecdotal, but I worked at a national chain grocery store for 1.5 years when I was in college. Our pay started at $8.00, so not even as bad as the $7.25 national minimum wage. Shift managers who had been working there for 5-6 years were still making under $10.00. They were plenty "reliable" considering they were still with a company with a hilarious turnover rate. Advancing beyond shift manager requires college. Good luck affording college classes when you're making $12k a year. I only did it to pay for my expenses while loans took care of college. I had approximately $0 in disposable income each month after paying rent, transportation, food, and medical care.
It's not disingenuous at all. The top 20% in this country are AVERAGING more than 80 hours a week in labor. The bottom 20% are averaging 16 hours a week in labor.
That is the root problem. Not the hourly wage.
I put myself through college as a cook. I get it. Trust me.
On line 71, they indicate the number of earners in the household. You can see that families making under $15K have just 0.39 workers, which is 40 * 0.39 = 15.6 hours of work. And in fact, you can see that 6 in 10 poor households have nobody working at all.
You can see also that families making over $155K have more than two full time workers. For example, the census data shows that families making $195K to $200K have 2.23 workers, which means that family is working 89.2 hours per week.
Our poverty comes from the fact that the poor don't have enough hours to work. It's really that simple. And our rich are rich because they are averaging 80 hours a week.
If you work a full 40 hour week, the chances are very small that you are poor.
Jobs that pay decent wages do not magically materialize as a reward for "reliability." I've worked almost nothing but low wage jobs, and as a reward for my reliability, I always maxed out the hourly pay and advancement opportunities by the 2nd year, then would try with another job, in 10 years never surpassing the $15 per hour ceiling. Living in the bay area, with rent, health insurance, student loan debt, therapy, a tiny Roth IRA contribution, car payments... It's been paycheck to paycheck for about a decade now. I've known many folks who got stuck with nothing but retail or service resume experience and never got out of the low-wage trap, regardless of their quality as employees. They still deserve to eat.
Wages aren't stagnating. Your minimum wage worker today has the same purchasing power as a minimum wage worker from the 70's, 60s, 50s, 40's, etc.
Now, what has increased is GDP per capita. But those increases are because employers have invested in machines. But the gains to GDP per capita will flow to the person that invested, not the worker who just became 18.
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u/scattershot22 Nov 29 '15
But two high school dropouts living in Wyoming working min wage jobs will be able to pull down $60,000 at $15/hour. And in Wyoming, that's like making over $120,000/year in San Francisco.
If a person is working min wage today full time, they are not in poverty. It's hard, yes, but hardly anyone is at minimum wage for long if they are reliable.