[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.

[scarface74]

So you’re not even willing to give up more than 5% of your income and redistribute if yet you think everyone else should and you justify it by the fact that you work on open source audio software? I’m sure people struggling really appreciate that

So let’s say we redistribute the entire economy to each working age person (even though you are personally not willing to), how do we fund health care, infrastructure, education, people who need more than that from the government, etc? Who is going to invest in business? Do you suggest we tax everyone so that they have equal income? Should the fry cook make as much as the brain surgeon? Who is going to pay for the education needed for the more skilled jobs and what motivation does the doctor have to put in 8 additional years of school if they could make just as much money as the fry cook?

My children are grown, should my wife and I get the same income that someone with two special needs children get?

My parents are retired and doing pretty well for themselves with two pensions and two social security checks. Should we also tax them enough to make things more equal and tell them that they don’t deserve to keep their income after working 30 years?

That $66K might be enough for someone living in the MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. But it won’t be enough for someone living in Seattle. Do we also redistribute people across the United States to make the cost of living equal?

What’s to stop me from just moving overseas where I can take my talents and make more money and then you have a brain drain?