[PaulDavisThe1st]

If you want to advocate the position that there's some age where the correlation between work and income can or should be looser, be my guest.

For me, the bottom line is that spending 40 hours a week doing something that requires no skill should still entitle the employee to be able to live a basic life. Further, that it should require only one person in a family to do that work in order for the family do live a basic life. If the person wishes to earn more then they will need to acquire more skills one way or another.

I do not believe there can be any moral justification for somebody receiving 40 hours of someone's effort (even an unskilled effort) and not giving that person enough for a basic life. I don't care what the age of the person doing the work is, and yep, if the company cannot do that, it doesn't deserve to exist - it doesn't do anything valuable enough to pay its employees adequately, so it can disappear and nobody except the owners will care.

[scarface74]

So it costs a family of four about $7000 a month to live in San Francisco

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/San-Francisco

Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?

That’s $60/hour before taxes according to this gross up calculator

https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/grossup/california/r...

Portland Oregon is #25 on the list of the 50 largest metro areas in the US. A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?

https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/41051

[PaulDavisThe1st]

For the purposes of my answers, I am taking your cost-of-living values as they are. I am not convinced they are correct, but willing to assume that they are.

> Should the minimum wage there be $48/hour after taxes?

Yes.

> A living wage there is about $44/hour for a family of four. Should that be the minimum wage in Portland?

Yes.

What's your alternative? "Oh sorry, your job is requires so little skill that even though you could just spend 40 hours a week doing it, you will need to find at least another 20 hours a week doing something else to be able to afford a basic life"

I find that morally unsupportable.

[scarface74]

So you want to raise the minimum wage of everyone in San Francisco to $131K a year? How is that going go work out for inflation?

You want to raise the minimum wage of everyone in Portland to $91K year?

Let’s say the average grocery store has 6 people working every hour for 16 hours a day and 355 days a year. Their labor cost would be $1.465 million. Grocery stores already operate on thin margins (https://www.biz2credit.com/blog/2020/05/22/grocery-store-pro...) are you prepared to pay enough for the labor cost of the entire food chain to quadruple? From the people in the field, delivery truck drivers, etc?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Let's just say that I don't subscribe to the conservative traditional view of economics and politics that you're using to point out how absurd this sounds.

Yes, I believe we should be paying much, much more for most of the things in our lives. Right now, those of us who make about 80% of median income and above are essentially riding on the backs who make less. I think this is immoral, although I recognize that changing it is a millenia long project that faces staunch opposition.

I want to see GDP distributed more evenly. In reality, the likely end game is not that everyone in Portland makes $91k a year or more, but that there is massively more redistribution within the economy, high end incomes fall, overall highest:lowest income ratios drop, housing prices drop (because more housing is built, and housing ceases to be an investment), and lots more good stuff that

I wonder, how do you personally justify millions of people working for less than a living wage? Do you feel that there just has be a bunch of people who lose out in life, and that's just the way it is? What makes it all seem OK to you?

[scarface74]

I am not justifying anything. I am putting numbers behind your belief that “everyone who works for 40 hours a week should be able to support a family of four”. It’s easy to talk about ideals until the cold reality of numbers, inflation, etc are brought up.

How do you propose we restructure our economy so that everyone get a wage that supports a family of four?

How many people do you think will “lose out” if inflation sky rockets where food isn’t affordable? You can look at places like Venezuela to see what happens.

Do you personally give away enough of your income to bring your compensation down to the median household wage of $65K a year?

I assure you that I’m not a conservative by any means. I’m card carrying member of the F*## the police (and have been since the 90s), BLM, keep religion out of policy, pro-choice brigade.

But I’m also a student of economics and an MBA drop out with one course remaining (CS undergrad)

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> How do you propose we restructure our economy so that everyone get a wage that supports a family of four?

At its crudest, the US GDP is $23T. Divided among 350M people that's about $66k, for every living American. The working age population is about 215M, so that would be about $107k per working age American (not per household, per working age individual).

There's no need for money creation, we just need to spread the wealth around more evenly.

And note, I'm not actually advocating precisely equal income for everyone, or even every working age person. I suspect that some range of incomes is probably a good thing for society overall, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't need to be anything like it is today. The point is that redistribution is how we get there, not injecting money into the economy.

You might care to listen to someone who knows a lot more about this stuff than me. Thomas Piketty was on the Ezra Klein Show a couple of weeks ago, and talked about several "radical" schemes to alter the levels of inequality in western societies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

(there's a transcript there too, so you can read rather than listen if that's your preference).

I give away 5% of my income. That's not enough to bring it down to median levels. My work is relatively charitable in some sense though: I develop libre audio software, and convince people to pay me for it anyway.