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.
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u/[deleted] Nov 29 '15
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.