quote:U.S. labor market statistics indicate that many full-time jobs do not pay people enough to lift them out of poverty. Almost 10% of all families in which the head of household works full-time live below the official poverty line. Twenty-nine percent of large families (Two parents and three children or more) fall below the official poverty line. If poverty is looked at in the more accurate way to reflect what is needed for self-sufficiency, fully 54.6% of large families in the U.S. whose head of household works full time, live in poverty.
I find this a horrify set of statistics. In the US, over half of all families with 2 parents and 3 or more children whose head of household works full time, don't earn enough to be self-sufficient. This isn't single parent families, or people with out jobs. These are people with traditional nuclear families who work full time.
I find this a shameful. In a society with as much abundance as we have in the US, I can see no reason that full time employees shouldn't be paid enough to be self-sufficient. We are truly a society in moral decline.
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posted
If people decide to have a large family, shouldn't they take into consideration whether or not they will be able to support it?
Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
You're right, Rabbit, and this will only get worse as immigration laws are relaxed to even out the playing field for all the world's workers.
But what is the answer, thinking globally? The problem seems to be that there are enough unskilled laborers coming on to the market every year to keep the market value of unskilled labor very low. Many of the solutions which people have come up with to fix this don't help or make things worse. We need to find a better way.
Possible ideas to improve things:
1) Education, education, education. Fund programs such as the Harlem Children's Zone which lift kids out of the worst circumstances of poverty by transforming the whole neighborhood. Apply this approach in inner cities and in impoverished areas throughout the country.
2) Reward employers who take a mentor approach and have programs to educate and advance their lowest wage workers.
3) Fund social improvement programs not as more government bureaucracy, but on a "grant" basis to private companies in competition with one another based on their results and cost/benefit analyses.
I think many more people would be in favor of doing something if we could only find something that actually worked.
[ July 06, 2004, 02:49 PM: Message edited by: ak ]
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posted
Kaioshin, you also need to consider that people's circumstances can change dramatically when something unexpected occurs, such as job loss or high medical bills. Or heck, even divorce. When I was single I qualified as a member of the "working poor" meaning that after my divorce I worked full-time but still had no money. When I had my 2 children I did not expect to divorce, nor did I expect that their father would not pay child support.
When they do all the grunt work, we will all be able to go get lots of education and such stuff. Just make sure we keep around lasers, for when the robots amp up their resistence into full-blown revolt.
posted
Kaioshin: ...or even when something much more gradual occurs.
When my mother and stepfather married, he had a thriving business repairing local cars. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it was enough that we did all right. But as the years passed, cars grew more advanced, and his skills didn't. He switched to operating heavy equipment, but as he has aged it has gotten harder to find jobs. For us, that just dropped us deeper into the working class. For some people, it could have made things even worse.
As for me...well, I've just had a run of truly bad luck. At present, the amount of money being taken out of my check for social security is roughly equal to the difference between my previous job (at which I was doing fine) and my present job (at which I am struggling financially). It's very hard not to say, Give me back my money! If I had my money, I could pay for college without all this trauma, and then I'd have enough for the future without your social programs....Oh well. /rant
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posted
I dont think that the cases that you guys are citing occur very often. The statistic claims, "fully 54.6% of large families in the U.S. whose head of household works full time, live in poverty." I don't think that more than half of the large families in the country have gone through a disaster or something of the sort.
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posted
If you can't afford to support a large family, you shouldn't have a large family.
(Personal responsibility rant).
I think it irresponsible to breed and expect others to clean up after you.
That being said, middle and upper class families tend to have smaller amounts of children, as do families in highly industrialized nations -> Europe is currently experiencing a downturn in the native birthrate. Which, I suppose, is fortunate given the birthrate in parts of the world that should slow, haven't.
Unfortunately, the traditional single job family is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
Many jobs today simply do not require a dedicated, trained skillset which allows employees to command higher wages. Although this will vary from state to state and even city to city as to what the minimum wage jobs will pay.
posted
I think life-altering changes are very common. Many families I know have no savings at all and live paycheck to paycheck. It simply takes one thing - like a car breaking down, an auto accident, any number of things to put these families into a hole that will take them years to dig out of. Kind of a snowball effect.
posted
I guess I just got lucky here in CA. Minumum wage here is $6.75, which is nowhere near enough to be self sufficient in this state, if you don't work at least 40 hours a week.
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posted
Yeah, lets make it a living wage so no teenage will never have a summer job and we can get rid of ~50% of the available jobs (that are currently minimum wage).
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posted
How about if you're single, can only find a part time job where you live, have no car, no savings and live paycheck to paycheck? It's not easy for anyone these days... I think, and I know very little about economics, but wouldn't so many people living below the poverty line be bad for the economy? Consider this- Cut taxes for the rich, capital gains and such and it will NOT trickle down into the community. Most rich people will probably pocket their money. The less money people make, the more they want to spend. I know this for a fact. The more I want to go out, buy things, go to events and I simply can't do it. Raise the minimum wage or cut taxes for families making less than 30,000 dollars and they have more money to do the things they need. They'd be able to buy cars so they can get to better jobs. They'd be able to spend more time with their kids because they wouldn't have to work 2 part time jobs just to make ends meet. Wouldn't that be better for society? Wouldn't that mean less kids getting into trouble? Healthier workers not stressing themselves out to the point of sickness over their jobs. Doesn't that make sense?
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It makes sense as far as it goes. However, raising the minimum wage will cost jobs - this isn't conjecture. Businesses will either do without a service they previously paid minimum wage for, or people will figure out a way to automate some of it.
That doesn't mean we should ignore the problem. It means a government legislated minimum wage cannot solve it alone.
quote: I don't think that more than half of the large families in the country have gone through a disaster or something of the sort.
Perhaps you need more experience then. Mark Rank, a Washington University professor, recently published the book One Nation Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects us All. In this book he conclusively shows that 3/4ths of the US population will spend at least one year of their adult lives in poverty by the time they reach 75. If you ever have the opportunity to work with a church or community organization that gives assistance to families that are in trouble, you will find Rank's statistic to be valid. Even in middle class neighborhoods, it is astonishing how many families can't afford necessities like food, clothing and medical care without community assistance.
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quote:It makes sense as far as it goes. However, raising the minimum wage will cost jobs - this isn't conjecture. Businesses will either do without a service they previously paid minimum wage for, or people will figure out a way to automate some of it.
Dag,
while that seems to make sense intuitively, my understanding is that the reality is debatable.
For example, here's a link to a summary of a paper the Economic Policy Institute published looking at the effects of the increase in the minimum wage in 1996-1997.
quote:Four different tests of the two increases' employment impact - applied to a large number of demographic groups whose wages are sensitive to the minimum wage - fail to find any systematic, significant job loss associated with the 1996-97 increases. Not only are the estimated employment effects generally economically small and statistically insignificant, they are also almost as likely to be positive as negative. These empirical results, particularly those showing strong wage gains and no negative impact on job opportunities, are at odds with traditional economic theory, which argues that a rise in the minimum wage must cost jobs. Over the last decade, however, new economic models designed to reconsider low-wage labor markets may help explain the increasingly weak link between the minimum wage and low-wage employment opportunities. These more recent models, often referred to as "dynamic monopsony" models, incorporate the costs of recruiting, training, and motivating low-wage workers, variables neglected by more traditional models. Not only do these new models more realistically reflect the character of the low-wage labor market, but they also offer a better explanation of our central finding: the 1996-97 increase in the minimum wage has proven to be an effective tool for raising the earnings of low-wage workers without lowering their employment opportunities.
The old saying goes: "Figures lie and liars figure," so I am certain there are counter-studies from conservative and libertarian sources. From the website, these folks have an agenda as well. While I haven't done an exhaustive search on this, I'm guessing that the impact of an increase in the minimum is still a matter of argument and debate.
posted
Well, I've seen it happen to real people. Obviously, this doesn't address the net effects, but on a personal level, it certainly happens.
The flip side is that there is clearly a point where mandatory minimum wage increases would lower the number of jobs. We can pick a ridiculous number - say $20 per hour. At that point one of two things happens: 1) marginal jobs are cut when the benefit to the customer is outweighed by the cost increase, or 2) inflation occurs to the point that the $20 per hour's real value is cut drastically, and a lot of other people have taken real-dollar pay cuts.
I know people aren't advocating such a high minimum wage, but my guess would be that there's a point where the wage is too low, so raising it will have positive effects, and a point where it's clearly too high. Between these points the effects are probably sliding, but not in a linear fashion.
Here's the thing, though: There will always be jobs at the margins, where the only reason a full-time person is hired to do them is because the minimum wage is below a certain point. Above that point (which differs for each job), the job is just not done or is automated.
If you could pay a kid $5 to cut your lawn, or a professional gardener $5 to cut, trim, weed by hand, and plant flowers, which would you pick? But if the gardener's price rose, you'd fall back to just having the kid cut it and not worry about the rest.
In other words, the minimum wage cannot be the solution to non-living wages. Something else is needed.
posted
My guess is that it will just be a matter of time before the robots get fed up with lawyers and start agitating for torque reform.
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