This sounds high to most people, but if the minimum wage had kept up with its inflation-adjusted peak (1968), it’d be somewhere in the range of $31 to $32 an hour right now.
It never caught back up afterward, and has been severely harpooned in the years since, shifting unfathomable quantities of money to the wealthiest people. And it’s not just minimum wage workers… when you sink the wage and salary floor, nearly everyone made less than they should have been.
Not sure what industry you’re in, but the Maryland state government is hiring in quite a few agencies across a swath of different jobs at the moment (I have family in state government who see these things and talk about them).
Not great pay compared to the private sector in many cases, but the benefits are decent, and you can probably pick up a job fairly quickly that can tide you over while you work toward the next thing you want.
I’ve seen the food delivery apps work for people in urban environments, where everything is close together in packed blocks, and they can minimize transportation expenses by riding things like ebikes, electric scooters, and electric unicycles.
You are absolutely correct in that it’s difficult to make any money with those otherwise, if you’re stuck with a car. Fuel and wear and tear are going to eat most of anything you make.
I’ll just keep working from home EVERY day, and not getting a bunch of covid, colds, and flus from being jammed into small office spaces with a bunch of other people at once, thanks.
If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can’t have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
