You could rephrase it in your head as "single parent minimum wage worker can't afford housing" if it helps.
The idea that kids need their own bedroom is extremely modern. There’s no reputable science behind it.
side note: children are expensive and you probably shouldn't have them if you can't afford them
Until the US has universal, free contraception (and education about contraception), as well as easy access to their constitutional right to an abortion, this is not a fair argument.
Lots of people are actively misinformed about contraception in conservative public schools, and their access to abortion may be hindered by their state government.
The end result is that some people accidentally have children, and society shares the consequences of that one way or another.
Not very strong ones when it comes to raising children.
> side note: children are expensive and you probably shouldn't have them if you can't afford them
Well it's definitely not a living wage if you can't have a child.
You really think having a child or two is scope creep for the basic things every person should be able to do in their life without financial ruin?
Hahaha, yes the US is well known for its social safety nets. Like universal healthcare, paid maternity leave, or free contraceptives.
... if it helps...
There's over 100 years of scholarship and research on this if you're interested. You can get college degrees, have careers in these related fields.
American culture in general does not value and it's dismissive of it and that's probably why America's livibility metrics are so out of line with everyone else. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_livable_cities)
Or why the life expectancy is lower, suicide is about the same rate as sub-saharan Africa, and polls of satisfaction and happiness perform worse, etc.
Such problems can be addressed
There's also 100 years of research on how to pick up skills that aren't minimum skill and minimum wage.
Problems can be address... but so can skewed ideas of what you deserve and what reality shows you're going to get.
I grew up poor. I started with low-pay, low-skill jobs. I lived on couches and didn't have "2 bedroom apartments" because even before I got my college education I understood that not everyone can afford to live like that.
Know what I did? That college degree I mentioned... I got a skill in demand and became more than a burger flipper and dish washer.
The disconnect between our opinions is the expectation that you deserve a good life in a minimum wage job. People have been lied too that life is fair and that they deserve a minimum standard of life. I grew up with the expectation that I got what I earned and if I earned minimum wage? I got a lot less than a nice apartment.
This isn't about personal gumption and rugged individualism or some self-help personal bootstrap story. It's an economic policy question
Here's an example. Let's say there's a formula for success rate, here we'll define it as generating more revenue than cost for the state over the lifetime of an individual.
A policy proposal, say your rugged individualism, has a given success rate, return on aggregate investment, confounding variables that can affect its outcome, etc. You can typify the classes of failures and bucket them into categories that can be characterized by cost, which is up for definition. It could include a loss of potential economic output for instance.
That's what we're talking about here. It's not story time, it's math, data collection and stats time.
The minimum wage question is "should it be legal to compensate a full time worker at a rate where their wages cannot cover some definition of sustination? And if so, how will the remaining slack be accounted for?" not whether someone can visualize their success and follow some 12 rules for life or whatever. It's not relevant
Quantitative economics used to be big in the US, kinda made it a world power. If you read newspapers from the 1930s it becomes obvious fast. How it got replaced with policy based on quite literally narrative fiction is for another conversation. It wasn't a good move, folklore is a terrible substitute for science.
Pick some advocacy, let's go the other end, generous social services + adequate UBI.
"people will just be lazy and not work"
Alright sure, how many? Some industries more than others? Do we care as a society if those industries fold?
And what about those people, are they idling or pursuing financially riskier dreams like say local journalism or being a religious cleric? How many? How confident are we about this? Are they in general doing a good job?
Would we be ok with say more local journalists and less say fast food restaurants? Is that a good trade-off? Would this change land-use? Food availability? If we do a policy that will intentionally make these things fold, what's the possible exit strategies for things like the supplies and buildings? Is that what we want?
Are there test cases, anywhere in the world that did similar things? What were their reports on it?
This is the kind of discipline that was used to rebuild Japan and Europe after world war 2.
It's not about a "planned" economy, but instead a "catastrophe avoiding one". If the answer was something like "apparently, historically, when some country does X, a large number of people join criminal gangs and murder people" then, if you don't want that outcome, you probably don't want to do X.
China has also been doing this kind of interlocutor discipline since, that's debatable, certainly by 1990. People say they're no longer "communist". What they actually mean is the merit of a policy is no longer held up against the ideology of communism and then decided upon based on a purity test.
That process is actually super popular in the US. An accusation of a policy not aligning with the dogmatism of a particular flavor of capitalism is enough to kill the policy. Everything is held up to an ideological purity test where it's marked based on adherence alone. It's actually exactly what the Soviets did with things like Lysenkoism that led to millions dying from essentially communism applied to seed planting, fertilization and harvesting.
I know it sounds insane and that's because it is. Ever notice how economic policy debates seem a little crazy and detached from reality? Ever notice how policy is kinda DOA unless someone can spin a story and make it jive with a specific ideology and how they give exactly 0.000 weight to any historical analysis of what the policy does? It's a problem.
It shouldn't matter but instead it's literally the only thing that does.
You got lucky. Like really, statistically, you were incredibly lucky. Good genetics, lack of disabilities dire enough to stop you from working, no medical emergencies serious enough to put you in permanent debt, and obviously received some decently schooling on the government's dime as a child if you just "got a skill in demand" and a "college degree". Yes, the hard work helped to captalize on all of the good luck you had, but it didn't create the circumstances that allowed you to succeed. So if your argument is "why should these people who are less fortunate than me be allowed to live decently?", the response should be "you should be that person living in squalor, but you lucked out".
Yes... I was born in America.
Then I stopped relying on being lucky and took my poor ass (I grew up with a single parent and little to nothing) and worked my ass off to better myself (using the opportunities afforded in the wonderful country I was lucky enough to be born in).
> why should those less fortunate be allowed to live decently
The problem is definition of "decent". Poor people in America make 10x more than the AVERAGE global salary and have opportunities that people around the world envy. "I can't afford a good apartment" in other countries is "I can't eat and my kids are dying".
You say I'm lucky... I say you're entitled.
Funny thing is we're both correct and that still doesn't make "affordable housing" something that's realistically possible for 100% of people in 100% of the US much less the world.
Oh no, you still rely on being lucky. Especially if you went from being very poor to having a college degree, so many things completely outside of your control must have gone in your favor for that to happen. That is the definition of luck.
> You say I'm lucky... I say you're entitled.
Since you know nothing about me, I'm assuming you are lashing out here because I touched on a sensitive area for you. Maybe rocked your sense of being solely responsible for all of the good things that you've been fortunate to have?
> Funny thing is we're both correct
No. I really don't have any sense of entitlement. You, however, are incredibly lucky, you've really been in the top 1% for statistics on poverty. Remember to pay it forward.
"Lashing out" telling you the truth in an uncomfortable manner isn't lashing out... it's telling the truth. It's only lashing out if I... "touched on a sensitive areas for you". That sword cuts both ways.
I never said I controlled EVERYTHING... I already said I was lucky to be born American where even our poor people are so lucky they are in the top 1% of the world - past and present.
"I really don't have any sense of entitlement" Funny how many Americans says that while preaching from a platform of entitlement.
The average life GLOBALLY sets that the "minimum wage" life in the US is the top 10% globally.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/how-much-money-you-need-to-b...
> And the global median income is just $1,225 a year
You can be worth $4/k total and still be worth more than 50% of the world. Your $15-25k/year income for minimum wages is still 10x the global median and your "I can't afford a nice apartment" life is still 100x better than most of those places.
"every wage should be able" Why? Because you feel it should? Guess what? your feelings don't make land cheap, labor to build housing cheap or get rid of burdensome government bs that makes things 10x more expensive than the should be.
Your entitled opinion doesn't make things affordable or change the fact that the people crying about how bad they have it in the US have it 100x better than previous generations and current generations around the world.
That's why it's called a "political economy" the two are ultimately inseparable.
It's a question of autonomy, control, agency and liberty, not one of dollars in a bank.
This goes back over 100 years. Look at the Hollywood star system. Big names having essentially contracts of grueling work and enslavement for years under the Lochner era, they could make $1 million a movie but all the cash could be seized if they broke the 10 year contract or whatever and leave the person destitute. Stars who broke contracts and had everything taken away famously had to pawn off academy awards to try to feed themselves.
The people didn't really have meaningful freedom. That's why United Artists, SAG, DGA, AFTRA and WGA started. If you work on a big show, it's the Guild that gives you dental and health care, not the studio. They give it to you in the dry times too.
The money wasn't the problem, it was the enslavement. The politics and relationships is the actual thing, the money is just a temporary consequence
It may serve you well to learn about the values you are prioritizing. www.wamv.life is a tool that helps with self-awareness by measuring values, moods, and value utilization.
I have news for you: the world is run by min wage people, the entire system depends on having a large amount of people being paid as little as possible.
This is the "it's easy: just stop being poor" level of argumentation...
30%+ the US population should live in a single room flat and sleep on a sofa apparently:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/Households_vs...