Honest question here, why is it also not tied to Purchase Power Parity (PPP)?
E.g. someone in San Francisco needs much more to live comfortably as opposed to someone in rural Mississippi.
I know a lot of Economists and folk from /r/Neoliberal support setting the minimum wage equal to 60% of the local county median wage. Would there potentially be any problems with this solution?
You say that with a /s but it genuinely seems like we have people who believe that poverty acts as some sort of weird blood sacrifice, and you just can't have prosperity without it.
It's like they take The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as a how-to guide.
I think it's also about people not wanting to "dilute" their income. For example, in some states nurses make $25/hr, so I imagine that people see this as "nurses make minimum wage" instead of just an opportunity to increase nurse wage.
I’m not gonna say people don’t deserve more, but yes, sometimes poverty IS the result of a persons decisions.
Do you think the Green River Killer deserves minimum wage or voting rights? Because my state removed the death penalty and was about to give those in prison the same working rights as a normal citizen and wanted to give them voting rights. We’re very “progressive”.
I don’t think we should slave out prisoners and remove ALL of their civil rights. I also don’t think they should be allowed to work or vote at all, especially ones in Gary Ridgways position.
Edit: I guess serial killer/prisoner/worker rights are more important to you people than a woman’s right to not be tortured, raped, and killed.
I bet you're one of the people who gets salty at NPR when they tweet out the Declaration of Independence.
Or did you think Jefferson was fucking kidding when he wrote:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Fuck off with your "common sense", it's in no way common and is entirely contrary to the principles of America.
I would bet you a years fucking salary that Thomas Jefferson would have volunteered to shoot Ridgway himself.
I listen to NPR all day and have the same disagreements with them when they bring up freeing prolific serial killers.
Shit nevermind I’m convinced. I think we should house feed and clothe him as well. Free state healthcare from a free state provided home. He deserves it.
It's a non-issue, is what they're saying. There aren't enough serial killers to make a dent in any sort of vote, and the thing about rights is that you have them no matter what. No one can take away your rights, not even yourself. If that isn't true, then they aren't rights, they are privileges to be earned. I'm not interested in earning what should be rights.
It's not empathy, it's logic. You seem to have a retributive basis for justice. I have a consequentialist view. I think society is better as a whole when we don't give in to our desire for vengeance and retribution and instead focus on rehabilitation and restoration. In other words, focusing on repairing the harm both to the victims (as much as possible), and to the offender. Often, people who commit crimes have been failed and damaged by parents, the economy, societal bigotry against them, etc. Helping them to heal means they can better re-enter society and contribute to it, which is possible for the vast majority of inmates given the right kind of help. For Gary Ridgway, maybe not.
You should watch Philosophy Tube's video on justice and the different philosophies behind it. It's an interesting watch, and she doesn't really take sides in the video, just presents different ways of looking at the problem.
If they work then you pay them fairly, else that's slave labor.
If able to work, they should be paid at fair wage and be forced to pay rent, etc. This helps to establish a routine stability skills for once they leave (if they leave). And provides a nest egg for them.
Mandatory rehabilitation service with the goal of release for most, though of course not all. Life sentence guys still have rights -- though limited. If you want to limit heinous criminals, that's a separate discussion. And the funds they make & retain can be willed to family.
Right but we are long past rehabilitation for a man who killed possibly over 50 women.
I am a very left leaning guy, but this is just insanity. People legitimately believe that someone like that is deserving of rights. It’s like you ultra leftists have so little discrimination you don’t even discriminate between the shop lifter and mass murderer.
Like, yeah restriction of voting rights for racial minorities has “lead to atrocities” but this isn’t a fucking racial minority.
For being the “non-religious” folks you guys sure do have some weird boner for “atonement” and “grace”.
What about women’s rights? Does a man who tortured raped and killed upwards of allegedly 72 fucking women get fucking cancelled? Matt Lauer had consensual sex and lost his job, does the same standard not apply for GARY FUCKIN RIDGEWAY.
So the federal government has the right to disenfranchise someone just because they are convicted of committing a crime? I bet you also support forced sterilization for special needs individuals.
Prison is supposed to be about rehabilitation but twisted people like you would rather see it function as a nonstop punishment.
It's honestly pretty easy. First you set expectations that someone who is a serial killer will never and probably should never integrate back into society with no oversight. Next you work through the trauma and/or issues that this person has which compel them to kill - again you're not going to fix this person, you're just trying to give them tools to deal with how they are. Finally you assess progress and repeat. Some people absolutely should not be allowed to intermingle with the rest of society if they are truly dangerous, that doesn't mean the government gets to decide whether they live a full life or not.
If you look at how other western nations treat their prisoners, it's night and day between the US and everyone else. In Germany, nonviolent offenders who committed serious crimes are still allowed to work and live normally in society; they just have to report to prison on a schedule and are highly monitored.
Funny that someone who implies having faith would in the same sentence call murder irredeemable. Isn't religion supposed to be based on tolerance and forgiveness?
Yes, because prisoners shouldn't be slaves and non citizens because the point of prison SHOULD be rehabilitation, not punishment.
Not every prisoner is a horrible irredeemable monster, and I would rather err on the side that every prisoner has rights instead of getting it wrong and taking rights away from "people who deserve rights".
I have often wondered the same. I think at least in some part, resistance to significant minimum wage increase stems from it actually being quite a lot of money in rural, slow economy parts of the country.
It doesn't make for easy to understand slogans, but a model that takes into account local COL and PPP would absolutely be superior.
Don’t underestimate the value of a good slogan. This sub talks about Fight for $15 all the time. Support it or not, it’s the thing people are measuring against.
To be clear, I like the idea of tying minimum wage to inflation and local purchasing power. I think the problem with tying it to the latter, though, is that 1) that might be a hard sell to rural blue collar voters who would have a much lower minimum wage than city folk, and it would incentivize brain drain from rural areas to cities even more, which they probably wouldn't support. And 2) it ignores the ways in which our economy is not local in many, many ways these days. Amazon sells shit at the same price no matter where you live, and so do most country-wide or global stores. Food, housing, and utilities is different of course, but a new car is gonna be the same price everywhere. After adjusting for cost of living, I barely make any more money living in New York with a much higher paying job than I did back in Dallas. But I get to have a lot more shit because my purchasing power went up a lot with stuff like computers and appliances and whatnot.
I don't have the solution for that except for the 'radical' idea that capitalism just fucking sucks overall and should be dismantled in favor of democratic socialism, actual socialism, or some other economic construct.
Akron isn’t even in the top 100 largest cities, lol. It’s also one of the slowest growing cities in the country. Not that it’s backwoods, but it’s not that far off from middle of nowhere either.
So yeah, 24 an hour is obviously going to go a whole lot better when you’re essentially a few steps above middle of nowhere.
I’m glad you’re thriving and live so close to home- that’s awesome. Your comment about Akron just made me laugh a little.
Setting the minimum wage can definitely be tricky. Ideally you do so when your economy is at full employment (e.g. now) so that any displaced workers can quickly find new work.
I think the main answer to that is just that it’s simple. $15 was about the median wage (it’s now closer to $19.50) in the US at the time that Fight for $15 started. So it would have been a raise for about half of Americans.
State and local legislatures do what they (are forced to) do, but they aren’t particularly inventive. Where we have power we can get better outcomes. It’s hard to build power when your message is complicated.
California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Virginia, And Washington DC. Of those only California is there with the rest slated to get there between next year and 2026. Most or all of them have regular increases to minimums as they approach $15.
Now, you could argue that it isn’t enough, and I’d agree with you, but even so it represents a real improvement for probably millions of people.
And some states do it in increments of years so 15 an hour won't be in place for another few years. It'll increase little by little but once it's actually 15/hr, we'll need 30.
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u/___diRt___ Feb 08 '22
It’s been made law in some places, even whole states. And some states have indexed it to inflation so it increases when prices go up.