Is Fox news unironically the best place to learn about your new favorite social dem?
It’s amazing, all they need to do is write “socialist” and like Pavlov’s dogs maga instantly react with no thought…
How to make maga hate anything: “it’s socialism!”
Calling shit DEI is socialism!
Baby basket may sound like a weird one without context if you’re not already familiar with them, but I assume he’s talking about a maternity package, or “baby box” which is a wildly successful program in Finland and other parts of Europe. It’s a cardboard box filled with baby supplies, and the box itself doubles as their first crib. It’s not legal in the US ostensibly because of the cardboard, but functionally cuz we like to punish women every chance we get. Anyway, being cardboard causes literally zero problems, they help to prevent SIDS, and they’re cheap.
We should have been doing this for ages.
How dare they!
BTW $30 isn’t like a crazy high number for minimum wage. The current number is well below the poverty line for families everywhere in the United States, and New York has a very high cost of living. Minimum wage is explicitly intended to provide “the wages of decent living.” $30 per hour might actually be too low for New York City. $61,500 a year is barely going to pay the rent in the shittiest neighborhoods. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york-ny/
In Zurich, Switzerland, the cost of living is insane. It’s similar to NYC that way. The difference is that their minimum wage is 23.90 CHF / hour which is almost exactly $30 USD per hour.
Because it’s such a high cost city, people earning a minimum wage aren’t living a luxurious life. But, they do live a pretty “normal” life. They can go skiing in the winter (getting to the slopes using trains and trams). They can go out to eat as a treat, or go to a club. They can buy healthy foods, and can easily afford their (mandatory) health insurance.
It means a lot of things are more expensive, which basically means the middle class and rich are subsidizing the people earning the least. And this is despite Switzerland being an extremely right-wing country by European standards. You really see the affect of high minimum wages when you’re paying for things where a big part of the cost is minimum wage labour. Like, if you order food for delivery, you might as well order something expensive and luxurious, because you’re going to pay the equivalent of about $20 as a delivery fee.
It’s a system that seems to work a lot better than what NYC currently has. When even the lowest paid person is “comfortable”, they have more pride in their job, and more confidence in their value. They know they’re not as disposable. It also helps that Switzerland has much stronger unions than the US. 45% of all workers in Switzerland are covered by collective bargaining agreements, which is very low by European standards, but is way, way higher than the US rate of 12.1%.
There are already parallels between Zurich and NYC because of the presence of some extremely highly paid people, especially finance bros. But, Zurich should be a model for NYC, and with a $30 minimum wage, they’d take a big step towards that.
I live in NY, not NYC, and make $30/hr as a single guy. I live in someone’s garage just so I can have a savings/retirement investment…
Rent at a legitimate apartment complex would eat every remaining dollar I had after my other expenses. NY is definitely expensive…
My dad joked that I need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house and then paused for a second, doing the math and realizing that’s actually true if we were all around the $30/hr mark…
need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house
Or you could split the difference and get two wives with one job each.
Or you could get four wives with a part time job each.
Or you get 8 wives with one job each and now you are making profit over the money you need to buy a house.
My point is
You just invented inverse polygamy. You’re not getting multiple wives because you have a lot of money but because you need a lot of money.
Nah, just the odd man in a female dominant polycule.
I make just over $30/hr plus some bonuses. I’m struggling in a midsize Midwest city. I’d need roommates in NYC to live.
Monica and Rachel seem to have a lot of room in their place, they might let you stay if you helped with the rent.
Yep, a lot of people don’t realize 7.25 an hour at 40 hours a week is just about 15k a year. Good luck with that wage anywhere in the US.
If you give your whole life of working hours to a business, the compensation should be a bare minimum of all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Period.
I agree with your point, but I’ll also say fuck the bare minimum. Any business that cannot afford to pay a living wage has no business being in business. Poverty is exploitation.
I’d genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like “taxi driver” and “checkout operator” obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of “exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, ‘influencer’? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?”.
You’re thinking of garden hermits who often hang around follies.
And yes, most clerical offices and upper management dudes have them buzzing around them in swarms looking busy.
Not sure I would want my company involved the top three. Bottom two for sure tho!
But having the time and resources to pursue all of them should fit into any lifestyle package.
100%
Back when it was created, it was enough for a single earner to feed and house a whole family, it should always be compared to that metric and adjusted accordingly.
Yeah it just sounds ridiculously high in low cost of living areas where Fox’s faithful all live.
They really do hear this as “look at this outrageous tax on small business owners” instead of “oh look a living minimum wage - that would be good for Timmy when he graduates high school next year.”
Sure, that’s how we got here, but that’s not even true anymore. The most destitute and depressed regions still have a higher cost of living than the minimum wage would provide.
don’t let great be the enemy of good
I’ll support any increase. I’m just saying that, after it passes, we’re not done.
At the very least it should go up at the start of every financial year by the current rate of inflation.
my two cents (and if my upvotes are any indication my two cents is worthless) the real problem is that when you raise the minimum wage, you build an opportunity for companies to raise the prices on everything, and then we get into an inflation problem.
Example, my home state can raise minimum wage from 9 to 12 dollars an hour, but that 25% increase in pay would be all the excuse Walmart would need to jack up the prices to cover their loses;
Not saying we shouldn’t have a working/livable wage, but we gotta do something that forces companies to pay the workers more, and the owners/CEO less some how. Like an inverse tax calculation that benefits the company for paying lots of people more, instead of just the few at the time a premium.
I’m sure an economist can explain this better.
That’s one argument against, but it’s not proven true anywhere it’s been tested. Shoppers at Walmart have a price point they expect. They can only raise prices so much before sales begin to falter, and their labor costs are not the most significant cost in their stores. Think about how few Walmart employees you see in their massive stores. Real estate, fixtures, even the utility bills are going to outpace the labor increases. Plus, the additional costs are typically offset by the additional sales that happen because everyone has a little more disposable income.
Chain stores and restaurants charge roughly the same amounts regardless of the local labor rates. Things that do affect local prices are the things that affect unit costs, like tariffs, taxes, and transport costs.
You are completely correct that corporations will use any excuse to raise prices, but they’re going to raise prices as high as the market will bear regardless. That’s not a reason to depress demand by keeping wages too low to survive.
Science and reality disagree with your feelings. Do not parrot the disingenuous spam from the oligarchs.
We find that a 10% minimum wage hike translates into a 0.36% increase in the prices of grocery products. This magnitude is consistent with a full pass-through of cost increases into consumer prices.
Holy crabapples! Thank you for that link!
This would assume that these same businesses wouldn’t raise prices regardless, which is what they have already been doing, without the wage increase.
A higher minimum wage is how you force companies to pay employees more. There’s no real way to limit ceo pay that they won’t find loopholes for, but you could try to tie the max to some upper percentage of employee median pay
I think a potential solution to CEO pay and inflation, would be to set absolute income tiers for UBI and jobs. Work as a waitress? You get $40k a year, no more or less. Don’t work? Just $10k, plus everyone gets universal benefits such as free food packages, universal healthcare, and utilities. The highest paying job? $100k. This isn’t considering taxes, which effectively turn the $40k to $30k, and the $100k to $60k. This essentially means that a CEO is only twice the income of a clerk, so the market will be forced to set pricing of goods and services to reflect that.
Of course, advocates of malicious capitalism would scream bloody murder, talk about how some people deserve 1,500x the wage of an average person, and so forth.
Bluntly, I hate the excessively wealthy and want their excess to cease existing. They are a distortion that destroys lives. If there are distortions, they should be the kind that benefit EVERYONE. Not just Bezos, Musk, or Trump.
You’re not wrong that it can be inflationary, but the inflation has already happened. Besides, productivity is so high these business could afford to pay more with out a price increase, but they want to keep their margins.
I think especially in New York going after landlords, both housing and commercial, would do a great job at making it so smaller businesses (which New York has a ton of) don’t have to raise prices and to make it so the minimum wage doesn’t have to be as high. That’s why I think his rent freeze policy and whatever else he is going to do against land lords will help a lot.
I thought the republicans loved babies.
Wouldn’t they be all over the first two points there?
I’m going to misquote George Carlin here, “if you’re preborn your fine, if you’re preschool you’re fucked”.
No, they love unborn babies. Born babies cost the money they want to steal from our taxes.
They aren’t pro-life, they’re pro-birth.
They like to control unborn babies to birth because they’ll eventually be born with little chance of not being poor.
Keep them poor and stupid; eventually they’ll be old enough to vote republican. Remember, they love the uneducated.
Oh for sure, my saying that I attribute to them goes:
We need the poors to fight our wars and work on our factory floors.
Same with “support our troops.” Once they are vets it’s time to strip them of all their benefits
But they can’t prey on or traffic unborn babies. So they still have SOME interest in the born ones.
They want those from the immigrants. Seriously, what do you think all of this immigration crap is really about? They separate the kids from the families and they are putting everyone in camps that are ran by for-profit private, concentration camp companies. So money, power and sex, what it always is
Nah they just prey on the moms instead.
I wish I could do those mental backflips, but for physics and maths.
No, they love slaves, which babies will become if we withhold from them the necessities of life for long enough.
The ones that live at least.
They just like occupying uteruses and vaginas. That’s why so many of them act like douches.
Because the single most most thing in the entire world to them is making absolutely sure at all costs that no one “bad” ever gets anything for free. Even if that means leaving whole generations of their own kind without a pot to piss in. Better that 100 deserving should starve than one degenerate get a free lunch.
Why would a newborn need baskets of babies, that is so irresponsible.
Nice ICQ flower. :)
Gotta fight that declining birthrate. What better way than to dump babies into a home that you know is getting ready to care for babies?
It’s green! Those babies were upcycled!
HOW DARE YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ALREADY-BORNS, THE FREELOADING ASSHOLES DON’T DESERVE MY TAXEEEES!! REEEEEEEE!!!
Umm…will you be our president?
Born in Uganda, unfortunately.
Uganda be joking
Kenya believe it
You gotta be Africa nature to not believe it.
Guy is a total Chad.
True, he’ll just lay his balls out on the table and say “what’re ya Ghana do about it?”
Where can you see lions?
Let’s see how he handles NY. Kids got promise though.
He still has to win. I feel like he will, but still gotta get there first. I half fear for his life, he is exactly the type of person not allowed to win so im sure he has a target on his back which is scary…
I can see it now… And in a massive upset Cuomo wins by xxx write in ballots /s
Just because I think it bears repeating, fuck Cuomo.
Hmmm.
So… baby baskets to newborns is about SIDS and keeping them alive. No Cost Childcare is about keeping them alive and well, too.
So… about them kids?
Fetuses matter, not children.
Until they’re 18 then they can die for the cause!
Nah,
They’re happier when they’re being shot en masse in schools
Then they can wave their little compensators around screaming about how they’re the real victims because people want to take their firearms away
we should normalize lego collections as dick compensation devices.
legos never hurt anybody. Well. Not seriously, and really, you shouldn’t leave your legos out to be stepped on…
(edit. er. maybe we normalize k’nex. I don’t want to look like I’m compensating with my lego collection. or my erector set)
As a kid, I always preferred the knex. Something about the blockiness of legos has always seems… I don’t know, just boring to me. I want the long spindly plastic not-tubes that barely resemble the stick figure drawing I made of crap!
mega bloks, then? they even have the halo franchise…
Did Mamdani pay for this victory ad?
I’m so happy he won :D and in such a landslide
Full mast
When you’re so out of touch that you’re trying to make the guy look bad whilst in reality accidentally praising him
Changing the fixed dollar amount of minimum wage is only a temporary fix that guarantees another uphill struggle in the future
Minimum should be tied to cost of living changes not a specific dollar amount that has to be fought over way after minimum wage no longer meets the minimum cost of living
