Living Wage Calculator

Link

This is an open thread for discussions of the minimum wage, cost of living, etc.

Cost of living for two adults and two kids in Makalilo Hawaii is $74,770 a year before tax, according to the site. I'm under that, but not by a whole lot, but we manage okay - occasionally I have a month that is a bit tight, but it works out. Hawaii tends to be pretty pricy overall, comparable to a major metropolitan area.

Neat link, by the way. I wouldn't mind being at that living rate they cite, I might be able to afford to buy a small house, then.

Let's see: $18,318 $35,271 $27,949 $44,926 $58,303

So, I can fairly easily support myself on minimum wage, but would have significant trouble supporting others.

http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/counties/37071

I'm living off ~500 dollars/ a month right now in savings. I'm single, rent is 300, utilities come with rent. No insurance. I walk for transport. Mom pays for my phone. The rest is food.

Things are definitely tight, but I planned for this, and I don't feel poor, but I never have to pay a babysitter either.

I know a couple with a family who live and own a car and home in a marriage with a shared income of 20,000 in rural Georgia, They have well water, a house they got a steal on, they're careful drivers with low insurance cost and very cheap cars, never buy a damn thing that isn't on sale. They probably don't have any savings, though.

edited 22nd Oct '10 12:55:25 AM by Roman

No insurance. I walk for transport. Mom pays for my phone.

I don't feel poor

Um...

Not every one feels the same way about what they need. I know my grandparents and my parents never had medical insurance when they were my age, and my dad didn't own a car when he was 25 (I'm 21), but I also know he definitely did hate it.

edited 22nd Oct '10 12:58:54 AM by Roman

Yep I have been under the living wage for two adults for some time now :/. I don't even get to spend as much monthly on food as they projected. Id love to good good 400 bucks worth of groceries holy cow we make it on about 130 a month for groceries.

I think that's the cost needed for one person working isn't it?

Well I don't like putting up any personal information about myself to avoid association fallacies.

Anyway, I missed a whole page of replies after I stated that when I looked for empirical evidence about minimum wage and unemployment, the evidence was ambiguous.

This site claims a "living wage" for one person in Portland is $8.73 an hour, while a family wage would be $27.30

One can see why employers would be very much against a family wage.

If there's only one wage-earner in the family, then yes, it's going to be that much for everyone to live with some financial security.

^ So if minimum wage was pegged to social justice like that, it would be in capitalists' self-interest to advance the position that a single-earner family is inherently unjust...

You could also argue that low income earners be paired with high income earners, so that family income can be met for more people. I'm not sure if tailoring marriages would be desirable... at all.

Bethlehem city, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. Good news is I'm comfortably above that figure with two wage-earners. What's intriguing, however, is the housing line. $816/mo for two adults and one child - where the hell in Bethlehem are they getting that figure from? Must be a seedier part of town than I'm in.

Rott, the income figures are aggregate for an entire family. So, in my case, if both my wife and I earned approx $10/hour, we'd have a living wage for our family as a whole. If one of us earned $20/hour and the other didn't work, it's the same result. So the figures argue for little more than that the minimum wage is grossly inadequate to support a family, even with two earners.

edited 22nd Oct '10 11:04:14 AM by Fighteer

@Fighteer: Not current minimum wage. Not by a long shot. The site is associated with activists who want the minimum wage raised to what's socially just. The question is then, "what's social justice?"

Talking to someone who does not appear to believe in social justice, it's hard to have a meaningful discussion. It so happens, though, that I agree that arbitrarily raising the minimum wage is not an ideal means of resolving income disparities, because it leads directly to inflationary pressure. I would support raising it to at least the poverty line, though, because I like the idea of kids being able to eat.

Talking to someone who does not appear to believe in social justice,

I think I do. I have a clear vision of what a just society would look like. How do you define it?

edited 22nd Oct '10 11:42:12 AM by Rottweiler

Last I checked, you believe in something called "natural law", which is a combination of Might Makes Right and Stay in the Kitchen. When I think of social justice, I think of positive freedoms, in the social liberal sense. Society is more productive and just as a whole when we support people who are unable to fully support themselves.

To that end, we may regulate things such as the minimum wage, to compel employers to pay people enough to allow them to support themselves.

edited 22nd Oct '10 1:05:55 PM by Fighteer

I know there's nothing I can do to prevent the derail, but at least don't turn this into the strawman-fest it's apparently headed towards. For instance, I don't think any of us are arguing that there's anything bad about a family in which one parent works and one parent takes care of the kids.

^ I certainly was not making any such argument. The living wage concept makes no distinction between single and multiple workers in a family, as long as they net enough. However, a single-earner at minimum wage cannot possibly keep a family out of poverty, so either individual earners have to earn more, or more people have to work.

Last I checked, you believe in something called "natural law", which is a combination of Might Makes Right and Stay In The Kitchen.

Wrong.

"There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man; and by behaving in conformity with which, man enjoys his true freedom. This is what the Christian Church calls 'the natural law'. The more closely the moral code agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behaviour; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called 'judgments of God'." — Dorothy L Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Natural law expresses the philosophical position that humans are born with attributes rather than their minds being blank slates, so societies succeed or fail according to how closely they conform to that underlying human reality their rulers could never socially engineer away.

The minimum wage concept is not, and never was geared to supporting a family. Complaining that a single minimum-wage job is insufficient to support a family is akin to complaining that Levis doesn't make business suits.

^ Right, I know that. I'm pointing out that the site linked conflates what the minimum wage is for with other wage floors, including the old-fashioned labor union concept of "family wage."

Since they're "living wage" activists, it would be nice if they'd define their term.

Except whether we like it or not it is the case for some folks that that is their current option.

Net earnings were also mentioned in the other arguments you both missed that bit. Two or three people working at minimum wage makes up for the lower pay. Or an individual working at a higher paying job which is what the high hourly rate estimate is for.

I think that their numbers may be a little high for where I am (Pasadena, CA). We're pretty close to it, but we always seem to have enough income for the things that come up (buying a bicycle, moving, that sort of thing).