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Totally disagree. It's 1000000 times better than without a job, a job at least helps mental status and boost some esteem. Also it's 1000000000000 times better than living on welfare or food stamps. for himself/herself and for the society.
Have you been a jobless adult or on food stamps?
Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that.
They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.
I clicked through to https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag..., which linked me to https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor..., which says the definition is on page 5 of https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/201911_.... It's actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the definition:
> While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the first to do so.
...
> The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.
They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever.
Moving on:
>However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on.
If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.
>Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.
For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:
>After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.
Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades"
The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a percentage of your wages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not always. Being in one of these low end jobs tends to beget staying in that low end job longer, making it more difficult to have the time to invest in getting a better job. Numerous studies have shown that giving people a bigger safety net may make them stay unemployed longer, but when they do get a job they end up making much more money and being happier overall.
You are thinking of people who go to college or get some sort of official training. However, the best way to earn more money is to get on the job ladder and start learning skills. Once you have some experience it’s far easier to earn more. Putting people on welfare doesn’t help people learn skills.
10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour because costs would double, too.
It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped spending it all.
Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods.
*edit:
To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started paying less.
This is one reason why I’m against the minimum wage - by making it harder to get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the employment market.
I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn’t account for local differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black market and the wages paid in cash.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is why we also track the labor force participation rate [0]. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
I can’t tell from your comment but I’m not sure this is what you expect. This is not people who have never had a job. This is a (now politically motivated) estimate of the number of employable people. Subtle difference.
>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year. Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that. They then make a bunch of broad…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not always. Being in one of these low end jobs tends to beget staying in that low end job longer, making it more difficult to have the time to invest in getting a better job. Numerous studies have shown that giving people a bigger safety net may make them stay unemployed longer, but when they do get a job they end up making much more money and being happier overall.
You are thinking of people who go to college or get some sort of official training. However, the best way to earn more money is to get on the job ladder and start learning skills. Once you have some experience it’s far easier to earn more. Putting people on welfare doesn’t help people learn skills.