You must have missed his point about minimum wage being only 1/3 of the lowest yearly income listed in the article. When it should, for all intents and purposes, be the minimum amount a full time worker would need for a living wage. And as FDR said,
by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
I agree that this article is flawed, though it seems to be aiming for “click bait fun” rather than “expert financial advice”. So I think your expectations might be flawed.
Furthermore, speaking of the “minimum living wage”, I think this FDR quote is relevant:
and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
With that in mind, I don’t agree with your assertion that wanting to live alone constitutes more than the minimum expectation an American should have for a decent living.
Minimum and decent are two different things, but I’m not sure how that is relevant?
Given that I specified my (and FDR’s) belief the minimum wage should be a decent** living wage, and not the bare minimum subsistence level, I clearly wasn’t talking about “two different things”, I was talking about a single concept.
That the minimum wage should afford full time workers a decent living. And that the ability to afford living alone is not an unreasonable ask by that yardstick.
Well, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, 1.6 million workers are at or below the federal minimum wadge. And I could break down the groups for you, but seeing as you could have just googled it yourself instead of incredulously asking internet strangers for anecdotal evidence, I’ll assume doing so would be a waste of my time.
Still, if you are genuinely curious, here is the report I mentioned.
Actually, the article is titled “The Salary a Single Person Needs to Get By in Every U.S. State”. And they go on to define their meaning of “getting by” as:
the minimum amount a single person would need to follow the 50/30/20 budget, using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Following this outline, 50% of income is used to cover necessities, such as housing and utility costs, 30% goes toward discretionary spending, and 20% is left for savings or investments.
So they really mean what they said, and I still don’t see the relavancy of you putting words in their mouth or using your own definitions. I mean, if you want to have a linguistics debate with them on the acceptable usage of “getting by”, more power to you I guess. But as they have defined their terms, its essentially a strawman argument against a silly for fun article.
Seeing as they defined their terms, your insistence on having a linguistics debate is pointless. If their definition of the nebulous term “getting by” matches your definition of “decent” (another nebulous term), that’s fine so long as what level you are actually discussing is defined. Which they did.
Beyond that, “decent” was never a word they used, it was a term I used quoting FDR in regards to the minimum wage, in regards to you talking about the minimum wage.
So I really don’t see the point you are trying to make.
Ah, well, that’s a dumb point then. The article is silly, I’ve been saying that from the beginning. But again, your expectations for it are silly also.
And if you mean FDR was categorically wrong because minimum wage has the word minimum in it, you are playing more linguistic games and are frankly just wrong. “Minimum wage” means the lowest financial compensation allowed, not the minimum number possible (which would basically be slavery). And by his definition, the intent was to provide a decent life to all American workers.
On the other hand, if you mean that in your opinion a full time worker in America does not deserve to live a decent life, then you are morally wrong. On the contrary, a business that can’t afford to provide a decent standard of living for its employees does not deserve to exist. Though that I suppose, depends on the value you place on human dignity. If you don’t think your fellow Americans deserve a decent life, then we simply don’t see eye to eye, and as per the golden rule, you are not worthy of dignity or respect either.
The salary a single person needs to get by in every U.S. state ( www.cnbc.com )