Flyover towns certainly have $10/h jobs. Amazon pays $15/h and it's in plenty of flyover towns. If you live in a bubble where you think flyover towns somehow don't have $10/h jobs you need to get out of the Bay. They don't have high paying 6-figure salaried jobs, though.

The people in places where living expenses are high are getting $18 minimum and often times $22-25/h. The $15 "living wage" myth is garbage because HCoL areas already have higher wages and LCoL areas aren't that expensive that you couldn't live on $10/h. If you raise the minimum you won't change the shitty living situation in HCoL areas and you'll just drive closures and automation in LCoL areas. Source: Bay Area restaurant job listings

> The idea you're going to cut rent prices by a factor of 5 is about as detached from reality as it's possible to get.

I never said you'd be able to cut rent prices by 5x, merely that doing so would alleviate basically every concern about a "living wage". I know that West Coast NIMBYism would never let the level of density needed to achieve that happen. In China you can get an apartment for <3k RMB/mo even in a city like Shanghai, but in China the government can tell you to GTFO and bulldoze your apartment and replace it with skyscrapers which would never happen in the U.S. If you just tore down anything in SF under 10 floors and replaced it with 40 floor towers you'd instantly increase density by 20x.

And now you see why no one is having children nowadays. It's the natural order of late stage capitalism. Having children is just not rewarding from a cost-benefit analysis

Your reward for an entire year of miserable work is maybe being able to afford car maintenance and xmas gifts or a brief and cheap local holiday! Relax on holiday for a few days and then it's back to the grindstone for another 360 days.

> They were basically wage-slaves.

Most people are wage slaves, they biggest difference between them is the quality and quantity of beads and trinkets they receive to sweeten the misery.

Raising wages without corresponding increase in productivity just leads to inflation, which disproportionately benefits asset holders. If everyone's wages go up, no one's wages go up, barring an increase in productivity. We are seeing that play out as we speak across the United States. CPI grossly underestimates real inflation, particularly in inelastic categories like housing, education, and healthcare. Massive improvements in technology have hidden the inflation of basic needs like food. A loaf of bread is still the same loaf of bread 20 years later so CPI doesn't adjust its price downwards even though in real terms that loaf costs much less to produce and ship in 2021 than 1980 due to technology. But the real price of land and the real cost of a skilled human's time (for housing, education and healthcare) haven't changed so we see massive inflation there, even though food prices seem like they're following CPI. In effect, the wage for unskilled workers in the 1980s was artificially propped up by the minimum wage, and now we're seeing the market reset to the true real (in an economic sense) value of their productivity as real world inflation outstrips CPI but minimum wage indexes to CPI. Meanwhile the nominal wages for skilled professionals have kept pace since their real value wasn't artificially propped up by minimum wage.

You can argue for a higher minimum wage now (say $25/h) but 10-20 years down the line you'll be back where you started. Housing, education, and healthcare will increase faster than CPI until the new equilibrium is reached and the minimum wage represents the true real value of the productivity of an unskilled job. The real solution is to automate all of these jobs away and fund free community college for STEM majors and trade schools so that you get real productivity gains rather than more monopoly money to play with.

It's not even "maybe."

His supposition is incredibly clueless. He ignores FICA / Medicare payments, for one. That $100 in his ideal scenario?

He never accounted for it. Just like he doesn't understand that most big box hourly workers don't get to defer taxes til the end of the year.

Main skill is Programmer although I can do Admin and Network Support. 10 years+ experience and growing. Took years of school and a few low paying jobs to get the experience.