Is Fox news unironically the best place to learn about your new favorite social dem?
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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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/
It's accountability for the fact that cost of living has risen astronomically and for quite a while since the time that $7.25 or even $16.50 was a livable wage, especially in NYC
Conservatives are going to scream about minimum wage not fixing the problem but the fact is cost of living is not going down even with their best efforts. It's time to go up, and that's not an unreasonable amount.
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.
Ironically, every level of Maslow's Hierarchy is behind a paywall.
Self-actualization is only a luxury for the rich.
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?".
It's about 20%, according to Ricardian Theorems.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they're playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
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.
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.
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.
Have you ordered delivery in New York? $20 in fees and tips are not uncommon at all. But that reinforces the point, things are not usually expensive because of high labor costs. It's a cost, but businesses that can't afford to pay for labor are exploitation.
Time to go skiing? NO. They should be working 9 days a week. No one should have time for anything except working to make the rich cunts even fucking richer :/
/s
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...
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.
True... Math was never my strongest ability...
But I can't even get one partner, let alone a group lol
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.
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.
I'm not good at math, but looking at the chart I think the average is dragged up but the huge spike of $5k+/mo units. You can find places for ~$2k/mo that don't look terrible, assuming the listings on zillow are real. That's still too expensive, but better than the $3700 average on that chart.
"It could be worse!" is extremely small comfort, though.
$2k a month is $24000 a year, almost 40% of your income. That's not sustainable, even if you can find low rent places.
I think the recommendation is 30% of income goes into shelter? Not sure if that's gross or net. You'd want to be making $80k i think, if it's gross.
Anyway, this is all hair splitting. Basic costs are too high, yes.
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.
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.”