Communism

You know the rest. A great illustration of what that saying means is this article where the writer tells us the “living wage” for a family of four in Florida. Let’s read their definition of a “living wage.”

“Living wage” is defined as the income required to cover 50% necessities, 30% discretionary spending and 20% for savings. 

They then take the $23,637 cost of housing, $10,069 for food, and $7,350 for healthcare, which adds up to $40,056 for necessities. These necessities should be half of your income, so this extrapolates to a living wage of $80,112 per year, which they then somehow round up to more than $112,000.

Note that a “living wage” is what is being used to demand a minimum wage based upon 50% of the expenses of an average family of four. They begin with the expected cost of housing for a Florida family of four: $23,637. Let’s call that $2k a month. According to rent.com, that is the average cost of a two bedroom apartment. Not the minimum, the average, and that is the average across the entire state. If you move to a more affordable area, the rent will be less.

So the left takes the average cost of rent across the entire state, adds in a 40% fudge factor, then states that this is the minimum required to live. Liars figure.

Expect liars to push for yet another increase in Florida’s $15 an hour minimum wage.

Seattle, which already as a $19.97 per hour minimum wage, passed a law mandating delivery driver minimum wage. Using a complicated formula, the law dictated that delivery drivers receive a living wage. The law caused delivery companies to pass the added costs on to the consumer in the form of extra delivery fees. The next thing you know, people in the Seattle area had to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches, with taxes and the neew delivery fees comprising nearly 30 percent of the total bill.

The free market responded, as it always does. They don’t call it the LAW of supply and demand for nothing.

Seattle residents started deleting their delivery apps from their phones in response to the spiking exorbitant delivery prices. Uber Eats experienced a 30-percent decline in order volume in the city, while DoorDash reported 30,000 fewer orders within just the first two weeks of the ordinance taking effect.

As a result, the income for drivers actually went down. A driver who made $931 in a week this time last year saw his earnings drop by half to $464.81. Small restaurants are hurting, delivery drivers are hurting, and people who depend on food deliveries are not able to get food because drivers are quitting in droves. So do the socialists in charge admit that they were wrong, and change the law? Of course not.

A spokesman for the mayor noted that “should the data show there have been unintended impacts for workers and small businesses, we are always open to making improvements”—a criterion which has clearly been met already—but nonetheless clarified that the mayor still “stands strongly in support” of the minimum wage ordinance.

Meanwhile, the president of the City Council claims she is “very worried” about the ordinance’s impacts so far—and even argues that “it’s not the role of policymakers to regulate the profit margins of companies”—before going on to say “I’m not going to redo the whole legislation.”

The law required that the city hire more bureaucrats to administer the law, and that is the point of most socialist laws- to increase the size and power of government and its officials. Just remember, the reason why communism and socialism fails is because the right people haven’t been in charge, and true communism hasn’t been tried yet.

Joe Biden wants to give a tax credit to half a million people so they can buy houses in distressed urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods. This shows a complete lack of understanding how supply and demand works. Even worse, there are Republicans who are buying in to this idiocy.

Let me tell you how this plays out. If you want to skip to the short version, this tax credit will affect the price of homes in the same way that government tax credits and loans have affected college tuition, as well as the way that minimum wage increases and free COVID money affected the price of everything.

Throwing this money at people in the form of a tax credit to encourage home buying didn’t work when it was tried in the 90s, as evidenced by the economic crash of 2010. Throwing money at this simply increases the demand for houses, which at first drives up prices. Then, since this is a one time tax credit, the people who don’t make enough to make the payments get foreclosed on, which causes a ripple effect of other foreclosures and bankruptcies, which increases the supply side and drives down home prices.

Meanwhile, people like me who already own a few homes cash out at the inflated prices and wait for the housing bubble to burst and make a nice profit. I got caught on the bad side of that trade back in 2010 because the housing bubble bursting caused my hours and pay to be cut. This time, I will be ready for it.