Sounds like a signal from the market that they are not paying enough. One might argue about how social welfare programs and / or importing cheap labor distort the labor market; but it doesn’t change the fact that jobs are the dregs of the labor market.
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
Licensed vocational nurse don’t earn a huge amount.
Registered nurses (4 year degree+) make ok to good money.
Advanced practice nurses make good money overall. But they have post- graduate degrees and still don’t earn what a good senior developer does.
Based on the $49 charge for 5ml of sugar water to calm our newborn baby down so a nurse could draw his blood, probably not much.
(The nurse failed to draw his blood. After four or five failed attempts over several hours they eventually asked a nurse from the NICU to come over, who got it first try.)
Yes, that was the point. That the price of healthcare isn't based on the wages of the nurse.
Eventually it just becomes a physics problem. If $100 exist in the world, and one guy has $99, and you need to fund something that takes $2, you have to get $1 out of the rich guy somehow.
However this point also helps your argument: When you borrow you pay interest to someone richer. In a sense a combination of whoever you sent the money to, and the bank.
So change those unsustainable lifestyles then
The word "lifestyle" means more than beer, nice cars, and smoked-salmon-avocado-toast on vacation. It includes peoples' capability to invest in their future. I'm sure you can cite many examples of fools and their money being soon parted, but there are plenty of people doing everything right who are being screwed by inflation as well.
And if the prices are increasing 50%, then the low end pay increases must be a lot higher than 50%.
Your argument rests on an unspoken (and perhaps unrealized) premise that profits cannot be allowed to shrink; all costs must be passed to someone else.
So what do "we" do to make these jobs more tolerable, perhaps better-rewarded ? Nothing, apparently, because "we" wants the cheapest possibly everything.
If jobs that are tangibly important are still treating workers badly, simply because formal qualifications don't exist or are in oversupply, and then economic pressures push people into these crappy jobs despite poor pay & working conditions, then that's a sign that our oh-so-holy "market" is fundamentally dysfunctional, treating human beings like barely sentient Roombas-with-mops. Rant concludes here.
Penicillin distorts the growth of bacteria.
This will sound like a crazy commie rant to some people, but the trick that the powerful have played on is all is to think there's some natural market condition that is had for us to influence.
This matters because it leads to a generally lower quality of life.
Importation of cheap foreign labor distorts in the sense of reducing the wages of low-skilled native residents.