My rule of thumb is "the less I'd like to do a job, the more the person doing it should be paid."
It works well for all the so-called unskilled jobs that get routinely exploited.
No, they shouldn't make $15 an hour. They should make whatever is needed to sustain themselves and a family, including a pension and any healthcar costs. That's probably well over $15 an hour.
Went from making $36 an hour to... about $11.50 from SSDI.
Was too injured to even apply for unemployment in time, not that it would have mattered as I was utterly incapable of 'seeking work'.
More fun examples of how the poor live
Pro: Managed to Qualify for Section 8 in only 6 months.
Con: It almost certainly won't matter, as I got evicted from the inability to work, and now my credit score is also abysmal, and all Section 8 is is privately owned apartments (cough slumlords cough) who choose to accept a portion of rent and utility payments from Sec 8, that can absolutely refuse you for an eviction or bad credit, and have their own waitlists.
Once awarded a Section 8 voucher, well they expire in a couple months if you don't find a place. So you have to wait months or years again for Section 8 applications to even open up again, then apply for Section 8 and wait months or years to be awarded a voucher again, and then apply to Section 8 accepting slums with gigantic waitlists again.
High enough that the local average rent is no more than 30% of it.
Doesn't just make sure workers get paid adequately wherever they are, also provides a slight incentive towards making jobs in less developed regions of the country to bring more jobs out to the exurbs and such.
Ah, early 2021... back when $15/hr was at least somewhat decent. Heck, $15/hr was being fight for about a decade before even then. Maybe in ten more years $15/hr will become minimum wage and politicians will pat themselves on the back and claim they're the most pro-worker politician in US history for instituting a minimum wage that was argued for two decades in the past.
I suspect a number of middle-class workers are against the idea of a minimum wage increase because their wages have been mostly stagnant and they feel it's not fair that the lowest paid workers might approach their income, while billionaires and CEOs are buying up everything.
They're right, it isn't fair, but they're looking in the wrong direction. Instead of trying to prevent the lowest paid worker from approaching their income, they should be trying to reign in the top 1%. But I guess it's easier and feels better to say huge swaths of people don't deserve to make anywhere near as much money as they do rather than enduring the inconvenience of finding alternatives to Amazon, Facebook, Insta, Xitter, etc.
Not to dismiss the real problem of monopolies and market dominance-- but the docility and lack of resistance of such people would be startling if it weren't over shadowed by their misplaced contempt for the poor.
edit: typo
I love asking them to explain what negative consequences raising minimum wage would have for inflation and the economy, then asking them to explain how lowering income taxes wouldn't be even worse.
It should be relative to cost of living locally. I don't even know if breaking it up by state or region is enough. One half of my state you can live happily making $50,000 and the other half you need $150,000 to have the same quality of life. In some places it should be even higher than $15hr. Where I live the minimum wage for a full time employee should range between $20 and like $40+.
"Did you have this list of people you don't respect (I assume, because I can't fathom a criticism of paying someone more than the value their labor creates, therefore I'll just assume it's actually a value judgment of the person themself) ready to go, person I made up for this fake conversation?"
It's easy to shit on everything, so I'll try to avoid doing that.
I do genuinely not understand the blind "minimum wage should be this" angle. All raising the minimum wage does is raise expenses for everything. It's pretty much like fuel costs: price of fuel goes up - your bakery, pharmacy, grocer, etc all raise prices and in the end it is those on the lowest income that get impacted the most.
A bit of a mind dump:
Most of us live in a capitalist system. You can dislike it all you want, but as someone who's seen what happens when ownership is shared, everyone is equal, a cook should be able to run a country - fuck that. I'll take bad capitalism over that nonsense any day.
Everyone should strive to improve themselves. Every day. Doesn't have to be monetarily driven improvement - it's the mindset of constant improvement that I want. And when that happens - aiming for minimum wage becomes a thing of the past.
Everyone is not equal. Everyone must be given equal opportunity. We're good at different things, we absolutely suck at different things. Doesn't mean we're bad/wrong/mistreated if we try those things. What is wrong, however, is someone claiming they deserve something (great salary) when they suck at doing whatever they're doing. Just go do something else; preferably something you're good at.
Deep inside - we're apes. We need to keep ourselves busy as otherwise brain starts overcompensating for lack of activity and we end up being idiots on the internet. Given enough time that leads to us being idiots outside the internet as well.
Mental health issues are real. They're abused waaaay too much as an excuse to rot in the basement. Been there, done that. Start small, increment daily. Small, iterative steps. Everything takes time. Your choice on what gets your spend.