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In No State Can A Minimum Wage Worker Afford A One Bedroom Apartment
Earlier this month we learned that in 21 out of the 26 OECD member countries that have a minimum wage, working 40 hours per week at the pay floor would not be sufficient to keep one's family out of poverty. That rather stunning revelation comes as Democrats in the US push for a $12 minimum wage by 2020 and as pressure grows on companies like McDonald’s to raise wages for its lowest-paid employees.
Of course rising minimum wages can also have the rather counterintuitive side effect of harming those they’re meant to help because after all, when the cost of labor goes up, employers may simply fire people or, as we saw yesterday when McDonald’s pledged to reduce the number of company-owned restaurants by 10% over the next several years, resort to other measures aimed at getting around pay floor hikes.
So while one can debate pros and cons of addressing abysmal wage growth by legislating a non-market-driven solution, what is not up for debate is this: it’s getting harder and harder to subsist above the poverty line for low-income workers.
In fact, as the following map shows, in no state can a minimum wage worker afford a one bedroom apartment.
Here’s some color from a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition:
Rents for apartments have risen nationally for 23 straight quarters. As of the third quarter of 2014, rents were 15.2% higher than at the tail end of the Recession in 2009. Rising rents are an outcome of increased demand for rental housing. One recent study of 11 major cities found double-digit growth in the number of renters in nine of the 11 cities between 2006 and 2013. In the fourth quarter of 2014, the homeownership rate dropped to its lowest rate in twenty years and the rental vacancy rate fell to 7% as more households sought rental units. The downward pressure on vacancy rates directly impacts the rental housing market, making landlords less willing to offer rent concessions and more likely to increase rents. The tightening rental market has the most significant impact on low income renters.
So thank you Wall Street (and a hat tip to Alan Greenspan as well) for creating an entirely unsustainable housing bubble which finally collapsed on itself, turning a nation of homeowners into a nation of renters many of whom will now have to pony up everything they make each month to someone who may have gotten a landlord loan from Wall Street to buy up rental properties from home flippers who also got loans from Wall Street where some very clever investment bankers are busy securitizing these landlord and home flipper loans in order to sell billions in new ABS on the way to recreating the very same bubble only to have it burst all over again.
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Oh, I'm sorry. Forgive me. I was merely saying, directly, what the original poster wanted "stupid" people to do, but was too cowardly to actually say.
Oh, by the way, GO FUCK YOURSELF.
If the minimum wage is a reflection of the intellgience of humanity then humanity is soon to be an extinct species.
... like it try this.
This is so like health and safety, where a really dumb fuck would kill themselves rendering the remaining part of humanity more fucking clever and repeat that process on a grand scale hey we could all be Einsteins.
Everyone is born ignorant, dipshit. But most are born stupid. No reason to keep them around.
I love when pieces of shit on the right (by no means all people on the right) just expose themselves for who they really are. It's not about a free market with you people, you're just a selfish prick who wouldn't lift a finger for anyone besides yourself. I have friends of mine who work hard and are good people,but they just aren't very bright or clever. According to your 7th century wisdom, they should fall as low as a free market will let them. FUCK THEM, right?
No, FUCK YOU.
How much do you get for posting?
Long cardboard boxes and clearwater paper....................
The good news is in Hawaii you can work 24 hours a day Monday through Friday and enjoy the weekend.
Only an incompetent lazy idiot would remain a minimum wage proletariat.
Being a top student was not enough. Hard work was not enough. It was Nepotism that saved me from being a minimum wage slave. Actually, it was also Nepotism that got me my first minimum wage job. These days I have qualifications and experience that get me work, and I also have several qualifications that supposedly make me a "wanted man" but I have yet to use in the real world.
The free market value of hard work and enthusiasm is ZERO. You got more than that? Sure you may be smart, you may work hard. But you also got lucky.
"Only an incompetent lazy idiot would remain a minimum wage proletariat"? No. Something else is missing.
Maybe several things. And yes I've read "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" so don't bother trying to pull that crap either.
... but why are we even discussing minimum wage here? As somone else noted here, EVEN PEOPLE ON SIX FIGURE INCOMES ARE HAVING TROUBLE FINDING AFFORDABLE HOUSING.
The real problem is that houses are sold to the highest bidder and that bidder's price is determined by HOW MUCH THE BANKSTERS ARE WILLING TO LEND THEM AND THAT PRICE HAS NO CORRELATION WITH THE BORROWER'S ABILITY TO MAKE REPAYMENTS. YOU GO BROKE OR YOU GO WITHOUT.
Feel free to crap on a about supply and demand and free markets as much as you like, but if you are in a Capitalist transaction and your competitor is an idiot coupled to a bankster then you are the Patsy.
If that's the case, they would move to labor camps with joy.
they failed to properly adjust their figures for the obama invitees streaming over the border by the millions, @ 30 immigrants per 1 bedroom apt they can easily afford that on their combined incomes, as long as they get the free healthcare, food stamps, cells phones, and maybe just a smidgen of housing assistance.
Occupy That.
Whose fault is it that there are no jobs for 100 million people?
That would be their own fault for not working hard enough. Or at least, that's what I'm getting from this stream of unconsciousness.
First of all, this is not strictly true, as others have said. You can always find a cheaper flop somewhere, even in the big city.
But more important, nobody ever pretended that a minimum wage *should* be able to support life in a one-bedroom apartment. And I don't think it was much different 10, 30, 50, or 100 years ago.
That said, I'm for a minimum wage, and I largely support the current efforts to raise it, just to catch up with inflation, as the government rates it or the much higher real numbers. But even at $10/hr or even $15/hr, it's not going to buy you 1,000 square feet with concierge services in Beverly Hills. Get a friggin' roommate. Or a better job.
It is strictly true, and it's nonsense to pretend there isn't a problem. So where are the jobs?
That said, I'm for a minimum wage, and I largely support the current efforts to raise it
DISAGREE - 2 REASONS.
1.) Raise the minimum wage and all costs at the low end of the economy go up making absolutely no fucking difference.
2.) Nice fed policy tool if you see it in a world of zero growth you just inflated the economy by a % which is what they are after and as stated in 1.) has no benefit to the poorest.
SUPPORTING THE MINIMUMW WAGE IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS SUPPORTING THE FED QE POLICY TO INFLATE THE ECONOMY.
Fundamentally easrly 70's in UK (after we went bust IMF bailout) all wage rises were now % increases before it was a token sum for being a better worker than another. The % increase had to be used to enable incomes to have a direct correlation for the new rate of growth they introduced then. GOT TO PAY BACK DEBT AND KEEP THE BORROW AND INFLATION GAME GOING.
The FED lies about inflation as it is, do a poor persons commodity inflation and find it far higher than the 1%'ers - only food, energy, water and compare that to total income.
It’s the same here in England, property prices are ridiculous and rents are worse. A Council flat (social housing) went on the market in London for a million yesterday, the Government and banks are doing their best to push property price up and wages down things will snap at some point! Plus if you have the intellect to look beyond the state and media lies you can see that decent jobs have gone and have been replaced with shit low paid minimum wage job. People are not making the mistake of ending up stuck in minimum wage jobs; they are pretty much the only jobs on offer. As for the starting your own business thing it’s almost impossible, the national and local Gov’ here hammer the small business person for every tax they can while letting their huge corporate buddies off as many taxes as they can. The media here bang on about huge amounts of small business start ups but they all fold within a year,
I used to earn around £35k a year in the print industry but that was all moved over seas and now I am competing with immigrants for minimum wage. I have friends who still earn a decent income here but they are well aware that if they lose that job they are fucked and looking at a huge salary cut. All the fools on here feeling superior to low paid worker need to realise that they just have not been bull fucked by the system yet, they are working their way through the crowd and will get to you soon.
Best of luck to you. Most of the people on here actually think that people on minimum wage deserve to lead to awful lives. All they prove is their immense prickishness. But, don't worry, they'll end up at the bottom, too. After all, this is America. I myself am still lucky to have a good job and never forget that most of my good fortune is do to luck, not skill.
Most of the fucks on here think Obama is a socialist or that the usa is some sort of communist wasteland. Ha! 99% of all new income gains go to the upper one percent on top of the fact they already own 90 percent of the US's wealth. What a joke.
But, again, the dumb as shit fucks on here bitch about minimum wages, unions, immigration, Soros, Benghazi, and hope Scott walker is the next president of the United states (courtesy of the Koch brothers).
SO FUCKING STUPID.
Again, best of luck to you.
Bernie 2016
.
The comments quickly devolved into crapping on about minimum wages and totally missing from the equation was the other side of the Supply and Demand equation. Where are the innovative entreprenueurs building affordable homes for the minimum wage workers? Why aren't existing home prices going DOWN to reflect the reduced buying capacity of the population? As ZH fuckwits like to parrot, "SUPPLY AND DEMAND! SUPPLY AND DEMAND!" If prices are high then some entrepreneur comes in cheaper and steals all the customers. Why is that not happening? The simple answer is that no matter what you pay the minimum wage worker, the banks will lend him too much money and so housing will be over-priced no matter what his wage is. As I keep saying, the sensible worker is no match for an idiot and his bankster. The answer to the real estate price problem has nothing to do with minimum wages. The answer is to STOP LETTING BANKSTERS LEND TOO MUCH MONEY TO IDIOTS. No person in their right mind would spend more than 30% of their income on housing, but idiots will, and desperate people will. And by default the sensible people are forced to either pay up or live on the streets as they are outbid by the idiots and the desperate. No honest banker would lend to people who were in danger of defaulting. But synthetic CDOs and bankster bail-outs changed all that. Now all the honest bankers have been priced out of the system and all that is left is the bankster cronies.
Let the banksters decide how much to lend to people. No bank would deliberately lend to those who cannot repay. They'd go bankrupt. Well, actually, the banksters did lend to those who could not repay, they did sell those loans to idiot investors who didn't know what they were buying, they did go bankrupt and they did get baile out and they do continue to get bail-outs and bonuses while the rest of the country goes to hell.
Step one is to limit the banks' ability to lend to idiots who cannot afford repayments. Borrowers and banksters alike have already proven themselves unable to self-regulate. WHAT MORE EVIDENCE DO YOU NEED???
Do you think you have no right to tell the banksters how much money they can lend? Their decision is directly affecting your ability to afford anything. You labour is being priced at less than worthless fiat.
Again, where are the cheaper houses? How many man-hours does it take to build a house? How many man-hours does it take to pay for it? The difference is profit. How hard is it to get a minimum wage worker up to tradesman standard? (or apprentice standard or TA standard! - What % of the house is built by apprentices and TAs? - probably no TAs as TAs wouldn't work that cheap!)
And while we're at it, let's look at the price of land. After all, land just sits there.
Naaaaah, can't do that now can we?
Supply and demand! Supply and demand! You gotta work harder - I already work hard
You gotta innovate, get a better job ... Yeah, right.
I've already mentioned figures in another comment here but I'll add another one: In the first year I made $40k, the price of the median house went up by $40k - from $400k to $440k. Could've saved every cent that year and been no better off. Easy solution, buy the cheapest house in the cheapest suburb for half my wage plus repairs (CHEAPEST house, remember). House prices are not a wages problem. HOUSE PRICES IS A LENDING PROBLEM.
You're right. This is such a dumb problem to have in 2015. Supply and demand. All the us govt does is stoke the demand side. I'm in the Bay Area, which is not densely populated lest buildings above 6 stories block the views of the "liberals".
But this is an easy problem, at its core, to fix. There's plenty of public land...just start building houses and apartment complexes. Governments and businesses have been building shit for thousands of years....it's not hard.
Bernie 2016
When the banks didn't like the laws, they got them changed.
Liars Poker by Michael Lewis.
The Big Short (Inside The Doomsday Machine) by Michael Lewis.
Totally different stories but those two books go together.
Revolving door between govt and corps, start here:
https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving/search_result.php?priv=Goldman+Sachs
( or just Google it )
This is only the start of this story.
If you cannot obtain even a one bedroom apartment a few decades into the future the collateral that can be called upon to borrow against is non-existant so now you cannot afford to borrow in the future.
The minimum wage worker into the future now supports the economy even less and less and the volume of people purchasing supports the economy not the 1% who like the poor only buy 1 instance of an object.
This is all part of the stagnant future, the only central bank policy tool of QE = money creation to a population as they age will get more and more angry that can only be counteracted by the 1% by installing a totalitarian state.
The masses will be minimum wage whatever level you want to set as the economy resets itself at EXACTLY THE SAME at a higher level but the inability to borrow into the future just flatlined growth.
A perfect financial storm is building in the future and there will only be one to blame ... the central bank who persisted with the same policy to preserve themselves over ALL OTHERS.
"A perfect financial storm is building in the future and there will only be one to blame ... the central bank who persisted with the same policy to preserve themselves over ALL OTHERS."
Bullshit. The central bank has been charged with papering over the financial malfeasance of congress with monetary policy. Nothing more.
And congress has abdictated their responsibilities for the sole purpose of buying the votes of the idiots that elect them.
There is a storm coming, but it is the consequence of the actions of those that will suffer the most from it, and are the most responsibile for it.
The responsibility lies with all of us who spent our time bitching and pontificating here rather than rising from our iPads and becoming politically active. To those who have done that, thank you. Some effort is better than no effort. But max effort s required. Act as if your life depends on it -- because it does.
First, it only assumes that the worker works only 40 hours a week. Maybe I need to re-read the Magna Carta, or the Constitution, or the UN Charter on Human Rights, but last time I checked, you didn't have a "right" to only work a third of your waking life.
Second, what cost are they using to determine the "market price" of a one-bedroom apartment? I didn't see it anywhere in the article, and sense that is pretty fucking relevant, the fact that they left it out tells me they are full of shit.
Which is fine.
The progs want a command economy? Let them have it. Let the trains derail, and the fields go fallow. Let the lights go out, and the wheels stop turning.
If you can swim, then you won't be afraid of sinking the ship.
Let the parasites throw a tantrum and disappear into the Rockies. Real life will play out far differently than Rand's warped fairy tale. The fact is that working people will be better off once the leeches stop sucking every drop of blood from their bodies and demanding to be worshipped for it.
Last time I looked ( a few decades ago), a working man once could support a wife and kids and a car and a dog on a single income 40 hour week. Technology has advanced since then. So why are we going backwards????????
Last time I looked ( ~ early noughties ), within a few short years, the price of a decent house went from half the minimum wage to almost 100% of a TRADESMAN's wage. What? Did the entire middle class and lower class suddenly drop their productivity by 75%????????
NO! The banksters stole the lot through the simple process of lending money to idiots so the idiots could outbid everyone else. You already have nowhere to hide. You are no match for an idiot and his bankster.
Where are all the ENTREPRENEUUUURRRRRS increasing supply and undercutting the housing prices????
Fucking NONE! Productivity advances EVERYWHERE except in the price of houses and real estate. (... and US Health "Care").
Sorry, ain't got the spare time and cash for swimming lessons. We're all in the lower class section and the upper class has locked the gates. If I'm lucky, I might be above the water line and I might be able to bash out a port hole. But then I'll still be fucked. Good luck making it to the lifeboats. If I were you, I'd leave with one now before anyone notices the shortage.
Hong Kong minimum wage has just been raised to HKD$32.5 per hour effective May 1. That is less than US$ 4.2 an hour.
A 500 sq ft apartment in Hong Kong new fetches US $ 650 K. You can rent one for HKD $15500 a month, that is USD $ 2000 a month. A family of 4 live in one such apartment is considered middle class. Kids do their homework sitting on their beds.
I know the US is exceptional and no American should tolerate a minimum wage of $10+ an hour.
Where is that " my wife's sister lost her minimum wage job and now works at home making $100 an hour...." post ?
I just want to buy land somewhere the cheaper the better...
I'm trying to figure out how to live on land without paying for it. It's the only possible way to starve the banksters - live on land without paying, start a barter economy. The banksters used desperate, naive idiots to steal all the land. Don't kid yourself that what happened was anything less.
Bankster shitheads have already fucked our lives up, the fucking parasites still want moar. Smart viruses learn* that they shouldn't kill their host. Drug-fucked banksters still don't give a shit.
*okay, the viruses don't really learn. The potent ones just die when their host dies.
ZERO WORKS. At age 28 my son worked as an intern for a major sports network for $0 for a year, got hired by another sports network and is now a Sr. VP. My daughter wishes she could get any job, even at zero, so she would have something on her resume.