(2) After a year of this, the wife has a baby and works just 20 hrs a week, still at $15/hr. The husband has been promoted to store manager or higher (convenience and fast-food store chains are desperate for workers they can promote) and makes $25/hr.
(3) Their new combined income is $67,600–less than before, but still enough for a good life except in a few megalopolises. This is a completely realistic scenario, and not even demanding (the husband could easily continue to work 48 hrs a week). And it’s been done with jobs at convenience stores.
(4) If you come up with places where the starting wages are lower, they’re highly likely to be in poor states where the cost of living is lower. It’s still a realistic scenario. Making enough money to support a family is easy in the United State if you’re willing to work. Easier than it was in the fabled 1950s.
honestly this is ragebait and now i will take it. in this hypothetical you can find a 15$/hr entry level job with no qualifications in somewhere that is not a “megapolis”, have no pre existing medical condition, no accidents, no emergency medical expenses, no disabilities, no previous debt, no liabilities like taking care of family AND that still requires a second person and you working overtime 8 hours a week every week.
this entry level job somehow gives you full paid maternity leave and a flexible working schedule and has enough growth prospects to promote you to manager in JUST ONE YEAR almost doubling your salary, but you’ll still be making less money while having another person taken care of.
im not american but sure it’s probably a better place to live in than a huge portion of the world, but this is not even fantasy, this is simply mocking people for being poor. how many people do fit in with all the requirements for this hypothetical? like surely you gotta recognise that not everyone is a young couple with a clean slate, right? right???
This is total BS and this person has never had to live on a low wage. That $15/hr becomes $10/hr after taxes and health insurance (of which an increasingly small portion is given back to you in services), then rent takes another $7.50 off ($1200/mo) leaving you with $2.50/hr to live. That’s $400/month for gas, groceries, savings, and entertainment/shopping.
With a single basket of groceries frequently pushing $65-80 with inflation, you really only have about $100 left max for everything else.
This whole scheme is meant to force you to use consumer credit services. Ones that will compound your shortfall in interest making you a permanent debt slave to the credit agencies.
If you removed credit and reduced taxes (by actually using them to provide cheap/free services that reduce other financial burdens) you’d have a flourishing consumer spending market. However, direct wage expenditure is significantly less valuable than credit expenditure to financial institutions. They can leverage and trade consumer credit debt as an asset. They can’t trade debit spending.
this person has never had to live on a
lowwage
Oh yes the totally existing convenience stores that offer $15 an hour and overtime. Definitely not closer to $10 an hour maxing out at 35 hours to avoid paying benefits.
Oh it’s ‘the bell curve’ nazi
My local grocery store is still hiring at $11 an hour for skilled workers and $7.25 for non. In what universe is a gas station paying $15 an hour???
I think he’s using the pay rates from expensive metro areas while also insisting that they must not live in an expensive metro area.
Look, it’s simple, you live in rural Kentucky and then commute every morning to your 7-11 job in New York City, easy peasy.
How does the grocery store define “skilled”?
I think it means college degree, not sure tho
So the manager is allowed to have children and nobody else. Good system.
And even then, only in his made up scenario. Convience store mangers are not making 10 more an hour than workers, maybe 2 or 3 dollars more at most.
Not even demanding, but requires working 6 days a week?
I’m hearing bits and bobs from capitalist mouthpieces about weakening labour laws enough to make it economically feasible for them to bring back working 12 hour days for 6 days a week for a while now
Or 5 almost 10hr days. Who doesn’t love forced overtime!
This guy is so old, born in 1943, he’s not even a boomer. He’s silent gen. Why do these people, not just go sit down somewhere, and yell at the tv?
Why do these people, not just go sit down somewhere, and yell at the tv?
That’s kind of what twitter is these days, isn’t it’?
True, and every crank with opinions, now has a platform.
Easier than it was in the fabled 1950s
where a family of four or five could own a house, and a car, and want for nothing… with a stay-at-home parent and on one ‘gas station’ income
He also boasts “I haven’t worked fewer than 48 hours a week in about 60 years.”
linkHas he even done wage labor for a day in his life?
Considering his idea of work is writing the Bell Curve, he basically has never worked a day in his lofe
I’m sure his college speaking tours required 60+ hours of weekly of study to re-familiarize himself with his own “work”.
The American economy would shit itself if it were possible to simply be a quiet family that works retail jobs and raises a kid on 1 and a half incomes. Every aspect of American life for lower income people is presumed to have debt involved. Credit cards, home loans, medical debt, car payments. Those are how the gears turn and it’s what the capitalist class wants. They don’t want stable, financially independent workers. They want debt slaves who live off payday loans.
Maybe it is possible to live like Dr. Racist is suggesting, but it would involve a series of implausible circumstances to the point it’s not worth considering. It would be a family who somehow has no debt, a stable living circumstance, an assumed promotion after one year, no medical emergencies, no accidents, no layoffs, no sudden natural disasters, nothing. It would be threading a needle every single day, for the rest of their lives. Getting a royal flush every day.
This is a completely realistic scenario, and not even demanding (the husband could easily continue to work 48 hrs a week). And it’s been done
with jobs at convenience storesentirely in my imagination.THIS is capitalism’s “economists”? one that does calculations without taking taxation into consideration and then does further calculations based on hypothetical promotions and hypothetical wages for those roles? i know economics is a soft science but come the fuck on, you have to be a LITTLE more concrete than that no? and why does this dude think people should be working 50hrs a week? the 40hr work week was invented when one person was at home taking care of the housework. now, in his defense of this bullshit system, his solution is BOTH those people do a nearly combined 100 hours of labor per week, while nobody is taking care of the home, in hopes that one of them will be promoted so that the other can— not even stop working entirely to take care of the home, but just work LESS and still take care of the home and also somehow raise a kid while doing all this. again, to try to pretend the system that HE grew up in where ONE person working LESS than he’s proposing we do could afford to take care of a family and have savings while the other parent is at home keeping everything in order and raising the children
i hate these pig pieces of shit so much because they present these “solutions” to try and gaslight uninformed people into thinking we arent a far cry from capitalism’s supposed “glory days” that THEY grew up in and benefitted from meanwhile if you actually think even the tiniest bit about what he’s saying and apply just a little bit of historical analysis you see right through it and see what a dishonest piece of shit he is for trying to paint this as something anything other than dystopian
how about its the most basic human function to have a child and if your economic system doesnt permit people to do that then the system needs to be killed and if you disagree then so do you?
He’s an economist? Damn that’s incredibly sad
If you think that part of his work is bad, you should read his interviews about his time in Thailand, where he supposedly did some work on behalf of the American government on how to pacify a restive native population (in Thailand, these were the peasants and ethnic groups that got displaced to build western-accomodating hotels and resorts, and in the US the population were the african americans in the inner cities). Mind you, his trip to Thailand was before the Vietnam war even started IIRC, so he literally just went there to do experiments on racial control.
Actual demon of a human. And he seems to be a very big star with rightists. Go figure.
I would say Economists have more in common with ancient Roman Augers than they do Scientists. It’s a job for the rich by the rich, to justify why the rich are so rich. They’re the high priests of capital.
I make pretty much the hypothetical couples combined income, live in a low cost of living rural area, and its extremely tight to support a wife and kid on that.
Theres a lot of small stuff that help make it work, like my wife doesn’t have to work which avoids daycare costs or just the logistics of both parents having to go to work. We have a mortgage rather than rent which makes the cost of housing a bit lower.
All of that is just to say, even if we ignore the unicorn convenience store jobs, it still doesn’t really work out unless you have like 3 or 4 other life circumstances that also work in your favor. I’m struggling with this and im in a specialized job that requires experience and knowledge (and even then I’m payed above average for my area). It’s wild how out of touch some of these ghouls are.
3 or 4 other life circumstances that also work in your favor
only reason my partner and i are surviving (also no kids to support, just pets) we know we are on borrowed time, since health shit is coming in another 5 to 10 years and the only solution to that might be "accidents’ that ensure insurance payouts
I hope Charles Murray is eaten by gila monsters
feeding Charles Murray to wildlife is essentially feeding them bio hazards
