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.
3 Comments
wojtek · December 23, 2024 at 3:43 pm
“$80,112 per year, which they then somehow round up to more than $112,000”
I would assume that this “operation” involves addition of all taxes, SSA, medical, etc, on top of 80K.
There’s an interesting living wage calculator for the US at MIT. They do not include any of the “savings” or “30% for discretionary. As such I think they are much more reasonable. But they do make living wage dependent on the type and size of the family. Which I think is a strange thing, when defining a living wage, as for Orlando, FL, this gives values ranging from below 50K to over 120K 🙂
Divemedic · December 23, 2024 at 4:09 pm
We won’t stop until everyone earns an above average salary
It's just Boris · December 23, 2024 at 3:59 pm
The actual minimum wage is zero, for jobs that companies find don’t provide as much gain as they cost.
But anyway. Why stop at $15/hour? Or $20? $100? Why not? Or even, $10,000 per day someone shows up at all? Seriously – once you start making rationalizations for why $x/hr is what the minimum “should” be, there’s really no reason to not keep going.