Should a full time worker be able to fund their household expenditures based upon employment compensation or should we provide welfare assistance to make up for the difference between the employment compensation and the fundamental and mandatory costs of the employee's household? The expenditures must be funded and we need to decide which way to go. While it's irrelevant in principle there are some that want to know how much the living wage should be. Fortunately that's not a subjective number because the cost of living has been quantified for us by MIT, For pragmatic reasons it should be based upon the most typical or "median" household if we're to establish a national minimum wage. For that, to represent a median household a two adults, one child, with one adult working is used the basis for calculating an approximate minimum wage. To be accurate I'd need to average out the MIT cost of living for every county in every state because MIT was that detailed in the quantification of the Cost of Living but instead I'm going to use my county in my state and the "before tax income" necessary for two adults, one child, with one adult working is $46,432 and I'll round that down to $46,000. Rounding off a standard work year to 2,000 hours that would require a minimum wage of $23/hr. Once again, there's no alternative choices. Either we have a living wage or we fund welfare assistance. There's no other alternative for our society because we can't just have people becoming homeless because that costs far more in welfare assistance and human lives than just providing for the shortfall in compensation by the employers. Take your pick and then, if possible, explain why and perhaps share you're political ideology (e.g. Republican, Democrat, Independent, whatever).
Well welfare is important for those like me deemed unfit to be employed, but I will note for working people there needs to be better career education from K-12 so they can leave school employable in some skill set or some amount of government provided career education while adults at a low cost for continuing education so they might get jobs that pay well enough at some point. Which might be a better option than now having to often go into debt for career skills and more debt to retrain or update your skills which are prohibitive to lower income people.
What is a "living wage"? What is the minimum for "living"? The minimum literally is a roof over your head, food on the table, heat and/or AC, and maybe a phone mounted on a wall (for the younger generations this is how we used to have to use phones and yes they work). That is literally all a person needs to live, and I could argue that the phone is a luxury. This I am acceptable with, and all of this should be doable on minimum wage in most states. I realize that some states have a higher cost of living so the wage in those states may need to be adjusted. The problem is that people today feel they deserve more than the minimum. What they deserve though is a chance to succeed in the system (which they have), so if they want more, go to school be it trade or higher education and do something about it. There are tons of grants through city, state, and federal in most areas for the poor and or less fortunate to go to school.
Simple: Cut all the taxes and let everyone have a job so that they can make a living, feel useful and life-worthy.
Neither. At a bare minimum, If you want a "living wage", you get up early, show up on time every day, work hard every day, all day long, work extra hours, persevere, be diligent, honor your boss, gain skills, and get raises. The raises will come. If the job is going nowhere...no room for advancement....then move on to another. And do it all over again, only with more skills, and consequently, a better wage. That's how you eventually acquire a "living wage" as well as personal skills. Such a goal is up to the individual, not the employer. Your life is yours to manage, not someone else's life to manage for you. You have to learn to budget and spend wisely and make sacrifices, not just for life but for all eternity.
I would say we should go with welfare. Not every business position warrants paying a living wage. So like an emergency IT guy like me might work for 2 hours every month. That doesn't qualify us for a living wage. So we're priceless to the company that needs IT services as a favor and they don't have to pay a full time IT worker for an occasional hiccup with tech. Who are you to make a company pay ALL its employees a living wage, or put work requirements on my welfare so that I can't give my time and skills over to the business I choose to help???
Unfortunately you didn't give the option of voting for both. For me it's not either or, and let me explain why: In Austria there was a study done after the Wall Street crash in 1929 in a small town called Marienthal. Villages build in Austria tend to be build around a church making the church the center of the village. Marienthal was different because there was a factory build and the workers settled around the factory. As a result of the crash the factory went bankrupt and three quoters of the town became all of the sudden unemployed without being able to find a replacement job. Welfare assistance was also cut after a while, and the people had to figure out how to survive in a town without money or help of any kind. This study is a brilliant read for anybody who wants to understand how people act without support or hope. They become used to the circumstances and after a few years they seize looking for their life to change because they lost hope. This study done in the early 1930s represents my belief that welfare assistance is necessary to an extent that people can survive without problems. They shouldn't live comfortably, but they should live without starving, freezing, being able to get new training for a job, etc. Raising the minimum wage is also a necessity for any society. Depending on the cost of living the minimum wage should surpass the welfare assistance by at least 40 percentage points, so you actually can start "living" life, not merely surviving. To put what I just said into numbers: In Austria the welfare assistance would be 844.46 Euro a month. This is after taxes naturally and includes full medical care and access to public education, even universities. For a single person that is enough to afford a room or studio apartment and have a few hundred Euro a month for food and other necessities. Austria doesn't have a minimum wage, but for a comfortable living standard you'd need probably about 1200 Euro minimum after tax, which puts the income to about 27,500 Euro a year before taxes, so you could compare it to another country. Austria has by law 14 annual paychecks and 25 days of paid vacation. This makes it in my book possible for someone, who'd be on "minimum" wage to take a vacation at least once a year while living in some comfort. That wouldn't be the highlife by any means because it's usually barely enough for a car. And for Austrian standards I'm a conservative. If you then want household incomes, you'd basically have to double what I wrote for a single person...
There is no question in my mind that the $46,000 figure is what is needed for a living wage in today's world. The problem is that the cost of labor would rise dramatically for small business, as skilled labor would have to be paid substantially more than the entry level wage. The result would be a significant increase in the cost of doing business. Overheads would skyrocket (Cost of labor is already 75%-80% of business expense). Prices would also skyrocket to offset the cost, sales would plummet as businesses closed and jobs sacrificed. It is a worse case scenario, and will lead to a sorry conclusion. Let's not forget that the entry level wage is a learning wage and not an earning wage. This a very tough problem to solve.
I picked a living wage because there wasn't an option for all of the above. In essence for a civilized society to exist there needs to be a social safety net for those who aren't able to work for whatever reason. Not going to get sidetracked into what the reasons are and who qualifies because that is irrelevant. There is always going to be need for a welfare safety net so it isn't going away. The problem we have here is that because the minimum wage is below the living wage we have people who need both an income and welfare just to get by on a daily basis. By allowing corporations to NOT pay a living wage they are effectively leaching off of taxpayer subsidized labor. Yes, a living wage does raise prices but at the same time it lowers taxes. That is the trade off here. You can't pay people less than a living wage and have lower taxes so it becomes a question of understanding the math and choosing how you want to end up effectively paying these living wages. The current system is nothing more than a massive taxpayer subsidy to corporate payrolls. By making corporations pay living wages directly to employees taxpayers no longer have to provide subsidised housing, food and healthcare. That is true capitalism when it has to pay it's own way by paying living wages and we eliminate corporate welfare from creating a burden on taxpayers. A living wage creates more taxpayers who then end up sharing the tax burden and effectively lowering it by spreading it across more working taxpayers. The real problem is the corporate welfare that needs to be eliminated. Living wages make sense because they provide individuals with the freedom to make their own choices and become self reliant. This will ensure that corporations are dealing with real world expenses and paying their employees appropriate recompense for the labor that they are providing. Yes, there is still room for profit margins and everyone is better off because the overall welfare burden is limited to only those who truly need it.
) Is the person supposed to go naked because there's no money for clothing? If they don't have any money for transportation costs then how do they get to work? What about funding for typical household items that are "consumables" like soap and toilet paper? I won't be boring by creating a list but the expenditures necessary for the household cover so much more than just food, rent, energy and "maybe" a phone and that's the point. We might have our opinions but the minimum cost of living isn't based upon opinion. It's based upon analysis and has been quantified by MIT. Given the choice between personal opinion and MIT analysis I'm going to have to go with MIT even if it's my opinion that's being compared to MIT's analysis. The "living wage v welfare" question isn't based upon facts about the employee. The question of "living wage v welfare" is based upon the fact that the employers of tens of millions of workers are not providing enough compensation for the worker to support their household. Statistically tens of millions of working households (that account for 75% of all welfare recipients) require welfare assistance because the worker's employers doesn't provide a living wage. The workers aren't causing the necessity for the welfare assistance. The employers are causing the necessity for the welfare assistance.
The safety net must exist but that's not what's being addressed. The question only relates to "working poverty" that requires welfare assistance because the workers jobs don't provide a living wage that will support the employees household and 75% of all welfare recipients are members of a working household. We're not addressing the 25% of welfare recipients that are in the "safety net" group. There's actually a minimal increase in some prices that reflects virtually no significant impact to the overall cost of living in society. If property phased in over time a living wage could result in a change in the cost of living of less than 0.25%/yr. over perhaps a ten year implementation time period and no increase in the cost of living thereafter. The implementation time frame determines the potential annual increase to the cost of living and that increase ends when the change is fully implemented. No one would even notice a 1/4 of 1% increase in the annual cost of living. Our taxes are not linked to government expenditures and while government expenditures would certainly decline that doesn't change the taxation. If taxes were linked to government expenditures then we wouldn't have deficit spending and a decrease in spending would result in lower taxation (and an increase in government spending would increase the taxation). It costs more for the government to subsidize under-compensation that it does for the employers to provide adequate compensation. The subsidized amount typically translates into profits for the owners. I've read that Walmart employees receive $6 billion/yr in federal welfare benefits. I would think that a corporation with over $480 billion in annual sales could increase compensation by $6 billion per year to eliminate this dependency in government welfare by it's employees. This is also an interesting study on possible increases to prices based upon increased compensation. An increase of $6 billion in compensation for Walmart would only represent 1.25% of gross revenue. If Walmart raised prices it would only require a 1.25% increase in prices to offset the additional expenditure. None of us would even notice if a $200 flat screen TV price increased to $202.50 Once again a living wage only eliminates the necessity for welfare assistance (of any kind) for full time working households. It doesn't eliminate the "safety net" welfare expenditures. A living wage does not increase consumer spending. All it does is replace the source of funding the spending from the government to the employer. A living wage does not increase tax revenues. Taxation at the state level (e.g. sales taxes) was being paid for with the welfare benefits and that merely changes to being paid for with wages. Federal taxation is, in theory, only imposed on "positive" income and that's income above the cost of living for the household. A living wage does not provide income in excess of the cost of living for the household and so it isn't taxed by the federal government. That's in theory of course because our tax laws are really corrupted for the benefit of the wealthy and not for the poor that have a disproportionately high effective tax burden.
Cutting taxes doesn't result in job creation and if there's no requirement for a living wage then working doesn't result in "earning a living" for tens of millions of American households. I will agree that jobs that fail to provide a living wage do result in people not feeling "useful and life-worthy" which is a great argument for a living wage. People do want to work and support themselves but in millions of cases they work but can't support themselves. They're doing their part by working but the employers are not doing their part by providing compensation their employees can live on. BTW With unemployment at about 4.3% (the last time I checked) we don't have a problem with not having enough jobs. We have a problem with compensation.
If I want a new car, I borrow the money to buy a new car with payments I can afford or I don't buy a new car. I don't expect Warren Buffett to buy me a new car because he can afford to do so, and I want one.
The criteria of the living wage is based upon a full time worker supporting a household. Contracted work for specialized tasks by an enterprise costs more per hour than the hourly wages for a full time position that would perform those tasks.
It is the buying public that will pay the price for a living wage, because the huge increase in prices will have to be passed on. Inflation will skyrocket, and a grand recession will follow. Few people will have discretionary funds to fuel our economy, and imported items will be the name of the game. The job market will tank-guaranteed-since small business will be unable to sustain itself.The public will suffer greatly.
Assumes facts NOT in evidence. Henry Ford greatly increased the wages he was paying his workers and ended up with workers who could afford to buy his own products. There was no detrimental impact on the economy.
welfare is also people who are mentally or physically unable to work. or for folks who cant find a new decent job. and by the way, a living wage of $15 an hour is garbage if you live in a major metropolitan area and have a family of four
A full time Welfare Queen collects as much as $40,000 worth of free welfare for not lifting a finger. There is no incentive for her to get off it, and won't work 40 hours a week for $46,000 even if she was offered it. We should phase out welfare AND eliminate minimum wage laws. Let the market dictate wages, and let lazy poor move to another country stupid enough to take them in.
I vote for neither of the above. If a person is incapable of earning enough to sustain himself, and if the government must then step in to support him, then I don’t think that simply giving him money is an effective system. Instead, each town should have a designated area in which those who are wards of the state can live. It would provide the necessities of life: a roof over the head and heat in winter. It should have a laundry and latrines/shower so residents could maintain their hygiene. Each individual domocile should have food storage areas (including refrigerator/freezer) and cooking facilities. Perhaps a communal kitchen could be provided so that multiple families could cooperate with each other with regards to food preparation. Each ward of the state (possibly with his family) would be assigned a mentor who would help him increase his skill set with the goal of eventually being able to support himself without government assistance. The facility should have a commisary where residents could buy household goods (clothing, soap, toilet paper, etc.). It would not sell beer, liquor, cigarettes, etc. There are lots of other details that could be worked out, but the general idea is that rather than just hand people money, these wards of the state would be supervised and mentored in order to enable them to increase their skills so as to eventually become productive members of society.
And if they can't due to disability and the government experts say this person is unemployable to self-sufficiency or no one would employ them if on the market competing with other able bodied people to compete with?
Disabled people should be moved to another residence. They would still be wards of the state (unless they were taken care of by their family). However, their particular government residence would not be geared towards getting them back into the workforce. It would be geared towards keeping a roof over their head, clothes on their back, and food in their stomachs.
people are very good at taking care of those in need, without government,.... well at least until government decided it was proper to take about half of everything we make in the form of every tax and fee imaginable
