Transcript
A tweet saying "100k a year to take someone's order at Taco Bell . Totally makes sense.". It has a reply saying "Where the hell did you get that number? If someone's working enough hours to make that on $15 an hour, they deserve it. $15 an hour, a person working 40 a week makes $31,200 a year." the reply has 2 likes.
Apparently
The only limit to a person's salary is the following formula:
(Revenue - Expenses) / Number of workers
If the location makes that much money then the workers deserve $100k.
What is actually absurd is this idea we've all accepted that some other entity that doesn't actually do the work someone deserves the majority of the money.
Lots of great comments in here but somehow no one brought up that the federal minimum wage is still only $7.25/hr.
Some moron on Facebook was talking about how Trump raised the minimum wage because major brands like Walmart started paying $15 an hour (or whatever specific amount) at the lowest they offer new hires. I told her that, no, that's not what "raising the minimum wage" means. She insisted that because of Trump's brilliant economic prowess it allowed these companies to pay more.
Like, yeah, turns out of the federal minimum wage is so low that basically no one wants to work for it then people need to pay more to get workers. (I'm aware people still work for the actual minimum wage in case that isn't somehow abundantly clear.)
Most Americans are idiots.
"Imagine how dumb the average person is. Now considers half the people are dumber than that."
is a line I never hear from people who think they're in the bottom half.
The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that people with limited knowledge or skills in a specific area tend to overestimate their abilities and underestimate the abilities of others. This cognitive bias is often linked to a lack of metacognitive skills, which are necessary to recognize one's own incompetence. Essentially, if someone doesn't know something, they may also not realize they don't know it.
People can work for less, under the table or via wage theft. Very common in the lowest tiers of sex work, in house cleaning services, and in the agricultural sector where human trafficking is common place
Goodwill pays less than the federal minimum wage to disabled people.
Lol that's amazing. And sad.
It's sad how little people know about how their world works. I always knew they knew less than they let on, but hoo boy are they just putting shit like this out there these days. Proudly ignorant.
I promise I'm raising my kids better. Almost done with the first! Shame there's such a gap between em though...
She's not even ignorant. From the back and forth it was clear she knew that the federal minimum wage is still $7.25. It's like willful double think. I hate it. I've since emotionally detached from online "debates" and I feel better.
It's for the best
7.25, including tips.
Usually with tips it's like $2.13 or something. For wait staff that gets tips they're allowed to be paid less hourly. Their total pay for the day still has to be at least the federal minimum wage though.
Tips are so weird.
They're weird because of the Jim Crow South. Ain't that fun? Go on, dig into it. I'll wait here in Jim Crow 2: Electric Boogaloo
Which, by the way, was the whole point of the Boogaloo Boys. Yall remember the fascists in Hawaiian shirts? Yeah. This has been planned for a while.
The federal tipping wage is only $2.13. If that plus tips isn’t at least $7.25 then the employer is suppose to bridge the gap. That’s hard to track especially with cash tips so I’m sure you can guess how often that happens…
Also, I have seen this happen at multiple chain casual dining restaurants, if you do manage to track it, and they have to make up the difference more than once, they will fire you on the spot. They claim that only bad servers can't make tips. The fact that this exclusively happened to male servers is not important according to Big Boy.
I know of two restaurants who did this during the pandemic while denying affordable health insurance to their workers.
Yeah I remind people all the time. One of em closed. The other's still going cause it's literally the only Indian place in like 50+ miles
Wage theft is the largest form of theft in the US. Business owners think it's abhorrent when they get robbed, so they steal 100x the amount from their employees to make it right. You slap their face, they amputate your limb.
$100k a year at 40 hours a week is $48.08 an hour, which might be even easier to see how far off of reality they are.
I'd vote for that as min wage
Generally everyone has two weeks off so I use $/h * 2000 to get earnings pre tax, or 15(50*40). There are also ~~sick days~~ mental health days and bank holidays, so it could be better, but 2,000 is such a nice number
I wouldn't go quite that high right off the bat, but...
Just peg a full time, min wage, locally (metro area locally), to ~~1/3~~ 3x (EDIT, whoops, mathed backwards) the median price of renting a studio apartment.
Would this be an economically perfect policy?
Fuuuuck no.
Would this actually enable, at least theoretically, an 18 yo kicked out of the family house upon high school graduation, as is the cultural norm in most of America, to actually be at least theoretically capable of providing for themselves and starting their own life?
Again, assuming jobs actually exist, yes.
This would be the bare minimum needed to make the insanely out off touch asshole boomer logic even mildly line up with reality.
...
For my next policy:
All those with student loan debt, where those students were goaded into that student debt by their parents saying they'd never have a good paying career without a college education, where those students have also been underemployed (a job or jobs not actually crtitically reliant on their degree) for a period of 5 years or more...
Congrats students! That debt is now dischargable in a bankruptcy, and it becomes the responsibility of said parents, for whom it is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
Unrealistic?
Yes.
Fundamentally legally impossible?
Also probably yes.
... Morally correct, in spirit?
Oh, oh hell yes, yes.
...
For my third policy:
Graduated municipal landlord taxes based on how much a landlord charges a rental tenant for rent, in addition to existing property taxes.
If you are renting out a property for say, double area median rent for comparable sq ft, num bedrooms, etc? Well, now the landlord pays additional tax on that exorbitant rent.
Doesn't totally murder the profit motive, but highly disincentivizes putting high value homes and condos on the market for rent (and would thus incentivize putting them on the market actually for sale, at a reasonable price), incentivizes building modest new apartment buildings instead of only 'luxury' apartments.
All the proceeds of this tax of course go into funding housing subsidies for the poor, or directly building new, municipally operated, non profit apartment complexes.
... Just play the uno reverse card on the landlords, tax their rent extraction.
I assume you mean 3 times the cost of a studio apartment, not 1/3, unless you think every minimum wage worker should be sharing their studio apartment with 5 other roommates.
Ah, yes, it was near midnight when I made that post, I may have gotten the 'rent should be 1/3rd your income' rule backwards or inverted, or otherwise phrased clumsily!
directly building new, municipally operated, non profit apartment complexes
This is the crux of the answer if you want to solve housing prices, it doesn't really matter how you pay for it...but I like your way of paying for it
Could not get it through a coworker's head that there is something fundamentally wrong with expecting people to work at jobs lower than COL. They just say that person should get a better job if it doesn't pay bills... Not everyone gets that opportunity.
Fuck you-got mine mindset.
They just say that person should get a better job if it doesn’t pay bills…
And someone else will have to fill the position they left behind.
People who argue that certain jobs don't merit a living wage are just admitting that they believe society is dependent upon the economic exploitation of a permanent underclass. This is the same exact argument the pro-slavery movement made prior to the Civil War.
They're just admitting that they think that the folk who put their food on the shelves, answer phones for them and clean the facilities don't deserve a good life.
They have no problem being served by capitalism's underclass.
Maybe it's just an own-goal admitting it costs $100k a year to live wherever they do.
Hunter Thompson wrote "Hell's Angels" in 1967.
At the time, he gave examples of how hippies/bikers/artists were living.
A biker could get a job as a Union stevedore and earn enough in six months to hit the road for two years.
A part time waitress could afford to support her live-in boy friend.
Then Nixon/Reagan saved the middle class....
Apparently*
365 days a year * 24 hours a day * $15 = $131,400. So their estimate was short by $31,000, but it was just an estimate! Stop making fun of them for being a little wrong in their math.
365.25 days * 18 hours, 15 minutes and 14 seconds * $15 = $100,000
Since the average human can stay alive for extended periods with 5 hours of sleep per night, there is nearly 45 minutes of free time per day included where the employees can take toilet breaks and eat! What a great job actually.
Who needs to sleep anyways!
Are they saying that someone actually makes 100k at Taco Bell or are they one of those dipshits that are threatened by the idea of a Taco Bell employee making 100k/year as if a job already paying 100k/year wouldn't have the bargaining power to get even more?
I still agree with the sentiment that $15/hr is too much for that since it isn't even a real job: taking orders at Taco Bell.
Because that isn't a real job. Literally. What does this shit-fuck think happens at Taco Bell??? Some person takes the order and then stands around doing nothing at all? While they're waiting, the Hamburglar is in the back, squirting out hot McDonald's diarrhea into tortillas of various crispiness? Then the food wraps itself, jumps into a bag and then the window-gremlin throws the food into your car and auto-debits your account???
Even if this were a real position at Taco Bell, then, yes. I agree that some underutilized poor bastard better get at least $15/hr to be a seat-filler in that hellhole.
Either way, test your dumb fucking theory: go to Taco Bell and place your order. Then go to the window and tell the person who only takes orders that they have to stay and talk to you the entire time to prove that they don't do anything. Then, explain to them how they're overpaid and that $15/hr == $100K/yr. See how that goes.
I think everyone should be paid a living wage, even if their job is bullshit.
I think that bullshit jobs are almost even more damaging to a person's mental health and humanity than one that is physically taxing but not abusive.
I also hate the concept of a "living wage," because it implies that only people who work deserve to live. I want to see everyone supplied the means to live and for them to work for the things they want. Minimalists will be the new "billionaires."
I think the solution is Universal Basic Income with benefits, paired with fixed income ranks. Everyone within a rank gets exactly the same pay each year. Each job class falls into a specific rank, determined by objectively developed ERK metrics - Effort, Risk, Knowledge. Wealth and assets is capped alongside income, so someone like Bezos, Musk, or Trump can't have excessive wealth. In addition to this, I think that education should be treated as a paying job, rather than something that student pay for. A student forced to be a barista isn't able to focus on mastering their intended specialty, which is bullshit.
IMO, money should be for upgrading lifestyle, not used for survival. This would allow people to freely strike or protest, since their income doesn't dictate whether they get to eat or have a place to live.
While my concept is completely artificial, I would argue that the excessively wealthy distorts economic reality - so we might as well go with an deliberate distortion that serves everybody, rather than the few.
And that's what the minimum wage was intended to be, a living wage no matter how bullshit your job is. FDR even wrote about it publicly, confirming that yes, even if you're pumping gas, the intent was for you to be able to live well.
Instead, we chose to impoverish everyone so we can have 700 billionaires, and we can't change it, because our government caters to those 700 billionaires and couldn't care less about the working class and poor.
I'm wondering if genius twitter here didn't negociate an hour rate that he thought would get him in the 6 figures club and is learning that... hell no it won't!