How Much Fast Food Workers Earn In Every State

We need workers to earn a living wage.




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everyone that works forty hours a week should be able to raise there family

 

Education for the first 12 years is completely free in the US. After that it can cost money, but the best performing people can still go to university for free. From what I've seen of the European education systems, university is usually free, but only the best performers get to go to university - those who test well and are put into academic schools in about their fifth year of school. Most children I see here are put into trade schools and don't get the chance to go to university.

As for healthcare, that is a difference. In the US a person is expected to pay for his own healthcare. This actually works out cheaper for young, healthy people. Most people rarely need medical care before they are about 30. You may need help because of a broken arm or a minor illness, but most young people don't need the continuous, expensive care that necessitates insurance. Usually by the time a person is old enough to need that care, they have a good job that provides insurance and covers that care. On the other hand, the universal coverage that most European countries have does ensure that everyone is taken care of, even if they don't get a good job, or do need care while they are young. It also tends to cost less, overall. Although I would argue that the zero that most young people used to pay in the states was much cheaper than the taxes that the same young people have to pay in European countries to pay for healthcare that they won't use.

Like I said, it is really hard to compare two countries. I've lived in the US and Europe, and there are so many little differences involved it really is hard to tell who is better off. Some people are better off in the US, some are better off here. I really don't know overall which society is better off.

 

Exactly how big of a family should they be able to raise?

 

first of all a very dishonest comparison. what is the cost of living in each of those nations?

second if your only option is to make a living on fast food wages the problem isn't with the wage the problem is with you
go out get an education and or learn a marketable skill so your only option isn't fast food

 

It's a very complicated argument to develop: also history, traditions and culture play a huge role in how a country manages welfare, health care, but also public administration [in Italy the public component of the national economy is relevant, but not focused in great measure on the military sector, like in US, but on social services and activities of "public interests" ... in Italy trains, highways, aqueducts, electric plants, main streets ... have been a state property for decades and today they are managed by corporations which still see the state as main shareholder, or one of the main ones. This is why here public transport is very diffused and it's quite cheap].

 

Austrailia has a population of 22 million and is surrounded by ocean.

The US has over 320 million and climbing and has pleny of unskilled and uneducated illegals doing those fast food jobs.

The wage is just fine.

 

Sorry, life doesn't work that way. Even if you raise the minimum wage to $10.10 or even $15.00 an hour, you can't support an unlimited number of people on that working 40 hours a week, and it's no one else's responsibility to pay for raising other people's children. Having a child (or not having a child) is a CHOICE. Reasonable intelligent people consider their finances when making such a choice. It's ludicrous to expect that a job that requires NO experience and in many cases doesn't even require you to have finished high school yet (age 16) is going to support a family. An employee's productive value to their employer (what they are PAID for) doesn't change based upon that employee's personal expenses. The 17 year old drive through order taker still in high school hired a month ago provides the same value to the company as the 23 year old order taker with 3 kids who was hired a month ago.

 

The point is if being on welfare allows you to live a better life than working why bother?

 

working should always offer you a better life, but sadly the current min wage doesn't allow that

 

which is why many of us want to provide free birth control to the poor, to keep more children from growing up so poor

 

You think FreshAir's argument is about how much tax revenue they generate?

Cynical.

I thought Liberals didn't want to take money from the poor.

 

And since, according to our own government, only 2.5% of all hourly wage earners actually work for minimum wage, it's not an issue.

 

There already is free birth control. Don't have sex at all, pull out, or have sex when the female isn't fertile.

What you're asking for is every one to pay for someone's convenience.

 

Free birth control is available now. The problem is that too many people WANT a child even when they can't afford one, and because they know that people like you "don't want children to suffer", they go ahead and have one when they can't afford to KNOWING others will have to pick up the tab for their CHOICE. Most "poor" children aren't "accidents". You've got a lot of feel good slogans about how things "should" be that don't work in the real world. Responsible people "shouldn't" be expected to pay for the choices that others make. No one objects to anyone VOLUNTARILY taking on the responsibility of paying for other people's children, so feel free to do so, but stop trying to force others to take on that responsibility.

 

You say one, most seem to say a family of four. Many of us say minimum wage should only support one person, no kids.

How do we decide whose opinion to go with?

 

In the US, most utilities are either government run, or tightly government controlled. That one seems to be the same in every country I look into.

Mass transit is a great example of another very complicated topic with numerous factors involved. The simple difference is that mass transit just doesn't work well in much of the US because it is far less densely populated than any European country. This is a significant difference that people who have only seen one of the places just can't seem to comprehend. I know I didn't before I lived over here.

From what I've seen, even rural areas of Europe are fairly densely populated. Usually the nearest town is just a few kilometers away. It may only have a hundred people, but it is close, and there is another just a few kilometers beyond that, and so on. So even if you are in an area that is mostly small towns, there are so many of those little towns nearby that you still have tens of thousands of people within a half-hour drive. More importantly, that area is usually less than an hour away from a fairly large town. With that many people close together, you can easily put a central train station in, connect it with short bus routes, then have that train run to the nearby city, and you'll have enough people that it can justify the system.

The town I grew up in in the US was a small one. It was larger than many here, several thousand people, but still quite small. The next closest town was about an hour's drive away, and it was equally small. The nearest large town was more than two hours away, and you only passed a couple of small towns getting there. A train wouldn't get nearly enough customers to justify installing the line - it would be far too expensive to put in and run. The customers wouldn't be able to cover the fuel costs, much less the other costs. In the US, mass transit works well in large cities and densely packed areas, and trains work between city centers, but much of the US is just too large and spread out to support mass transit.

I do enjoy discussing the different cultures. Having seen two very different cultures first-hand, I see a lot of the little differences that you just don't see or hear about, and see a lot of the misconceptions that people in both cultures have. It is a really interesting set of topics to consider and discuss, and a topic that I often enter into with my European colleagues.

 

I think you are right.

If I think to my own home town [where a public transport system works very well], I have to remind that I live in a not crowded area of Italy. The "Verbano" is a far land, near to the borderline with Switzerland and full of mountains. The density of population is low [from an European perspective]. Anyway we've got 3 main centers above 15,000 inhabitants in less than 20km and a very important commercial city in the center of the area. Public buses are quite full of travelers [overall students and aged persons who don't like too much to drive].

Furthermore, we've got 3 hospitals [!! I know this sounds incredible for an American reader]. And they are full equipped hospitals, with advanced TAC tech and advanced operating theaters.

But we've got no soldiers and no cannons to protect us against an eventual invasion from Switzerland [!!]. This was to underline the cultural difference between Italy and US: what you spend in military bases, we spend in local hospitals.