[digitaltrees]

I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness.

I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.

[logicchains]

>I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers

There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.

[jancsika]

> There's an extreme selection bias there.

Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:

Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.

digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?

[dmoy]

I think the latter interpretation is correct. As in digitaltrees runs a business that does not pay its employees a living wage, who then have to rely on food banks and housing assistance.

[digitaltrees]

We don’t set the Medicaid reimbursement rate so we have no control over wages either. We work to be very disciplined about unit economics and fixed costs so as much money goes to caregivers as possible but if Medicaid pays $22hr you can’t pay $20 because you won’t cover the payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, or required clinical and other admin expenses.

[digitaltrees]

We have a private pay arm as well, so the other extreme. I also have a roofing company. And I look at the data.

[mrWiz]

If you read the rest of the comment you’ll find it’s about their employees rather than their clientele.

[digitaltrees]

It’s both. The clients are more impoverished but the caregivers also struggle.

I got into this to build software to lower admin expenses and improve operations for an otherwise under served industry. We are making progress and have supported thousands of people in having stable careers. The horror stories I could tell of other agencies exploiting people due to incompetence or malice are shocking.

[HEmanZ]

Median income in the US is much higher than $12-18/hr, it is about $30/hr. 25th percentile make $20/hr. 10th percentile make $15.58. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm

So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.

I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.

[digitaltrees]

They are within 25% of the of the median. So they are the lowest range of 50% of the bell curve.

[HEmanZ]

Literally not a single one of those numbers is above the 25th percentile. 18 < 20.

[taeric]

I would fully get behind us paying service providers far more than we do. To wit, it baffles me when people are upset about how much we allocate to pay for services that go to older people, but then we don't do any effort to make sure the services are provided by younger people. Indeed, we seem to go out of our way to make sure the people providing these services are, themselves, low income. It is baffling.

But even this feels like it is overstating things. You say folks are one car repair away from being homeless. And there is a lot of polling that shows people would struggle to pay for repairs. But full on homelessness? I can only assume that you are describing towns/cities that offer no transport assistance at all, that lands people into being so dependent on a car. I believe it, but I struggle to think this is literally half the nation.

[digitaltrees]

I had an employee that was homeless last week. We were trying to figure out what to do. We’ve been looking into buying apartments to convert them to condos for a first time home buyer program, but the economics are hard to make work. We have considered buying a camper that can move around

The reality is that when 40% of your income goes to rent, how many days of work can you miss before you can’t pay rent? If your car breaks down, how many days will your employer tolerate while you try to get it fixed, assuming you have the money to fix it.

You don’t have to believe me, just look up the state on the percentage of Americans living pay check to paycheck.

[taeric]

The stats on "living paycheck to paycheck" are notoriously rough. With some people that make 300k a year claiming they fit that category.

Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your given scenario. I actually lost my car when I was younger. Was a rough few months while I got used to commuting without one. And I was lucky to have a roommate that kept my cost of living down.

And I remain a proponent of increasing pay to service providers. As well as finding ways to provide cheaper living conditions. First time home buyer programs are great, but seem unlikely to be relevant for the workers we are talking about? I see the median age of home care nurses in rural areas drifts up to 51-53. Which, granted, I see the median age of first time home buyer is drifting up. I don't think it is as high as those workers, though.

I do think there is a problem here. I just don't think it rises to "half the nation lives in abject poverty."

[PaulHoule]

Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.

That is, Henry Ford changed the world because he deployed capital to make workers so productive that they could afford to buy the cars they make.

A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough to put their own children in child care. So child care fails to revolutionize the world the way the car did.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

[mmooss]

> A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough

They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.

[newfriend]

It's not "absurd"... you're confusing moral value with economic scale.

A $1T founder is rewarded for building a massive system that employs hundreds of thousands of people, moved technological progress forward dramatically, and has positively affected the lives millions.

A doctor provides life-saving care, but they are physically limited to helping one person at a time. A backup NBA forward might not save lives, but their work is broadcast and monetized across millions of screens at once.

Arguing that entertainment is "non-productive" ignores human nature. People gladly pay to be entertained. If sports have no value, do you feel the same way about books, art, and movies?

[PaulHoule]

To get to the Baumol effect, the movie actor can perform once and be seen by millions whereas the theater actor has to perform at least once a night in front of one roomful of people. So the former can get paid more, a lot more.

Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where being relegated can bring the money train for a team to a halt. You don't see working-class soccer fans complaining about this (they feel the value!) but the owners and many representatives of capital get fuming mad about it.

(Funny, growing up in youth soccer in the US taught me to think of the game as an exercise in Brownian motion where there are too many people on the field who aren't held accountable. It wasn't until I had an argument with a recommender system that couldn't accept that I hated soccer that changed my mind and turned me into one of those sports fans who rolls out of bed Saturday mornings to watch the Premier League that I realized how high the stakes are in the European game.)

[mmooss]

In European football, relegation is a zero sum outcome for society: One team is relegated and another promoted. On average, equal numbers of fans are happy or sad.

Acting is about art, which brings up different issues and value. But looking at broadcast sports, the marginal value of doing that work is still zero: If that person didn't play football, someone else would and the entertainment benefit would be the same (excluding the few extraordinary athletes like Messi).

[PaulHoule]

Well in American football we have the problem of teams that lumber on playing terribly for years and years. Like we have three teams in New York state and the Buffalo Bills (upstate) are good and the two in the city (the Giants and the Jets) are awful year after year.

If there was some accountability those teams would be better or would be playing at a different level or not at all. So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play. Personally I watching the New York Red Bulls (Major League Soccer) play in person but overall soccer is the US is not up to international standards.

What blows my mind about soccer in the UK is that interest is so great that they can support two leagues below the Premier League and I know there are leagues below those. When I went to the Cornell/Syracuse game which is a legendary matchup that attracts a lot of youth players in the audience I was just thinking of the depth and width of the pyramid of soccer play from Kindergarten all the way to the world cup which is what makes the soccer universe so compelling. (Kinda wish more of us enjoyed college soccer!)

[mmooss]

I understand how the marketplace works, but the value - the contribution, the marginal value - to society doesn't match it.

The $1T business owner doesn't provide nearly that much marginal value to society.

The backup (or starting) NBA forward provides zero marginal value - if they didn't do it, someone else would and the outcome for society, entertainment, would be the same. It doesn't matter how well they play basketball; that doesn't make it more entertaining (with a few extraordinary exceptions). People in the US enjoy college sports, where performance is much worse, as much as professional sports. People root for their 'bad' local team as much as a good one: they do prefer winning, but that is a zero sum tradeoff with the other team's fans.

The income for the two examples are the results of economic distortions.

My kids' teachers provide contribute far more than the latter, and far more than they are paid.

[AngryData]

That story about Ford is just PR. Ford had to increase wages because he was churning through so many employees from injury and burnout that he had to convince people even living 1000 miles away to consider moving to Detroit and working on an assembly line. Otherwise he literally could not fill all the positions needed to run an assembly line.

[digitaltrees]

Innovative companies at the beginning of growth cycles are always generous to employees. Look at all the perks showered on staff for a long time. They are starting to pull that back as they get monopoly market power.

I would agree with you that more capitalism would be better but only if you acknowledge that monopolies are not capitalism; they are the logical end and death spiral in unregulated and unmanaged capitalism.

They are the black hole that a dead star collapse into.

[wolvesechoes]

> Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.

Only someone blinded by ideology.

[throw0101a]

> Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.

In Capitalism surplus economic value goes to the Capital class, so it seems like it is working as designed.

[PaulHoule]

Some goes to the capital class, some goes to workers. The Marxist eschatology is that there are pressures that cause the fraction that goes to capital increases over time and breaks the system.

Look at the good deal that the UAW has gotten for auto workers in the system, both US car makers and the union are pretty happy right to keep this system in place and shrink in the face of technological change like electrification not to mention abandoning small cars for large cars that are profitable for now.

(Funny how I often I see "good old boys" driving Asian compacts because they can afford Asian compacts, and I see office workers driving big-ass trucks)

[digitaltrees]

But if that capital accumulation is unchecked it destroys the very market forces such as competition and price setting functions through supply and demand necessary for capitalism to work. So capitalists should want to prevent monopolies and concentration of wealth.

[throw0101a]

> So capitalists should want to prevent monopolies and concentration of wealth.

Why do you assume that Capital class has an ideological loyalty to the capitalist system? If they can get rich without having to compete or do any kind of effort, don't you think they'd prefer that to actually 'working' for the money? Once they've got theirs, do you think they care about what happens after?

[digitaltrees]

I don’t. That’s why I said capitalist not the capital class. Those are distinct groups. You can be a capitalist with no capital and a monopolists that would be happy with state capture once you win and a feudal oligarchy. Much of Silicon Valley is revealing themselves to be just that. They’re going to find out the stark consequences of taking all the toys on the playground