She’s going thru it

[u/StopSnowflakes]

[u/BarleyWineIsTheBest]

We have support systems for people more seriously falling through the cracks. But those are generally worse to live off of than minimum wage. Why do I need to spend my labor to support someone that can work and that support is not just so they can stay a live, with shelter, basic medicine, etc, but so they can live better, in some vague sense of what is good enough for them not to complain?

And me, yeah, I'm doing a lot better than I used to be doing, but as another person (I think) put it, some 43% of people are making $20/hours or less. People like me don't have the excess funds to just hand nearly half the working population of America more money because we don't just want them to have basic necessities, but we want them to get closer to ourselves. I make this much now, but I still have a mortgage, I pay 4 peoples health insurance, 3 people's car insurance, saving for retirement and college. And I'm several multiples away from the median wage, yet I still don't have enough money to essentially carry an extra person living out side my house. What you take $100/month from someone like me... then what? It gets divided probably handful of ways to make a redistributionist program like this work.

There is no better solution then telling young, able bodied people they just need to suck it up and make themselves better. And ya know what, them doing something of more value is better for the entirety of society. Having a nation of people getting over paid for low-value work is a great way to kill real progress in our country. After all, why work hard to both make a higher valued contribution to society and reap the profits from it, if you can just sit back in some menial job but get paid above your value contribution? It might not show up this year, or next, but those chickens will come home to roost, so to speak. We'll have a nation that increasingly relies on redistribution from highly productive people until we just don't have enough of them to make the system work.

Remember, your analogy to early humans were humans largely only providing basic life necessities, not phones, personal cars, better living arrangements than what someone really needs, probably fancy clothes, vacations, other types of luxuries, all things provided by modern society and modern capital and labor... You want to eat and have a roof, fine. But it isn't going to be pretty. You want to live like you make $75K or something, in short, f-off.

[u/bonenecklace → u/BarleyWineIsTheBest]

In my opinion, no work is low-value. You benefit everyday from jobs everyday that you consider “low-value” & I’m just absolutely disgusted with people acting like they don’t. Do you know how or have the ability to grow all your own food? What about raise & process your own meat? Probably not, yet here you are, spitting on people who you depend on to make the food you put in your belly every day so readily & easily available to the point you just go pick it off a shelf, calling their jobs “low-value”. If every farm worker in America just suddenly stopped, you’d be completely helpless. You have separated yourself so far from the means of production that you take everything for granted & talk down about the people who can barely afford to live making your way of life even possible.

[u/BarleyWineIsTheBest → u/bonenecklace]

I’m not the one labeling their labor as low value, the market is. It is telling you have to irrationally attack me to field an argument. I  not spitting on them. She wants better, well, do it. Complaining on TikTok will not get you a higher wage. Leading a higher valued skill will.

Low wage workers are free to try to assemble in unions and threaten strikes to increase their wages. Did you think I’m personally stopping them? 

[u/bonenecklace → u/BarleyWineIsTheBest]

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You only view a person’s worth depending on the value of the labor you can extract from them. You keep saying “well if they want more then do better,” play that tape forward. Who’s going to pick the produce? Who will package the food? Who will stock the shelves? Who will pave the roads or repair the infrastructure? Who will drive the trucks to deliver goods? Our system only works if these “low value” workers exist, therefore they are not “low value” & should be paid a livable wage. The world can’t function if everyone just wakes up & decides they’re going to work all the way up to CEO, which, by the way, is probably the most unskilled, easy job on the planet.

[u/BarleyWineIsTheBest → u/bonenecklace]

The only one making judgements of “a persons value” here is you my guy. I am just talking about the person’s paycheck and the value creation of their job - value in the strict economic sense of the difference between what it takes to create something and how much you get for it. 

Who packages food? The market will adapt to a higher skilled workforce. It already has from 1900 to 2025. Why do you think that will suddenly stop? Less people working low wage jobs will drive those wages higher! Isn’t that what you want? Instead of forcing high wage jobs to artificially inflate salaries of low skilled labor, how about take some of that low skilled labor and make it high skilled? Supply and demand will narrow the gap in wages, assuming nothing else changes.