Is Fox news unironically the best place to learn about your new favorite social dem?
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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BTW $30 isn't like a crazy high number for minimum wage. The current number is well below the poverty line for families everywhere in the United States, and New York has a very high cost of living. Minimum wage is explicitly intended to provide "the wages of decent living." $30 per hour might actually be too low for New York City. $61,500 a year is barely going to pay the rent in the shittiest neighborhoods. https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york-ny/
It's accountability for the fact that cost of living has risen astronomically and for quite a while since the time that $7.25 or even $16.50 was a livable wage, especially in NYC
Conservatives are going to scream about minimum wage not fixing the problem but the fact is cost of living is not going down even with their best efforts. It's time to go up, and that's not an unreasonable amount.
In Zurich, Switzerland, the cost of living is insane. It's similar to NYC that way. The difference is that their minimum wage is 23.90 CHF / hour which is almost exactly $30 USD per hour.
Because it's such a high cost city, people earning a minimum wage aren't living a luxurious life. But, they do live a pretty "normal" life. They can go skiing in the winter (getting to the slopes using trains and trams). They can go out to eat as a treat, or go to a club. They can buy healthy foods, and can easily afford their (mandatory) health insurance.
It means a lot of things are more expensive, which basically means the middle class and rich are subsidizing the people earning the least. And this is despite Switzerland being an extremely right-wing country by European standards. You really see the affect of high minimum wages when you're paying for things where a big part of the cost is minimum wage labour. Like, if you order food for delivery, you might as well order something expensive and luxurious, because you're going to pay the equivalent of about $20 as a delivery fee.
It's a system that seems to work a lot better than what NYC currently has. When even the lowest paid person is "comfortable", they have more pride in their job, and more confidence in their value. They know they're not as disposable. It also helps that Switzerland has much stronger unions than the US. 45% of all workers in Switzerland are covered by collective bargaining agreements, which is very low by European standards, but is way, way higher than the US rate of 12.1%.
There are already parallels between Zurich and NYC because of the presence of some extremely highly paid people, especially finance bros. But, Zurich should be a model for NYC, and with a $30 minimum wage, they'd take a big step towards that.
Have you ordered delivery in New York? $20 in fees and tips are not uncommon at all. But that reinforces the point, things are not usually expensive because of high labor costs. It's a cost, but businesses that can't afford to pay for labor are exploitation.
Time to go skiing? NO. They should be working 9 days a week. No one should have time for anything except working to make the rich cunts even fucking richer :/
/s
Everybody should have a minimum income that they can comfortably live from in every country, period.
In CH are all the restaurants etc. expensive due to the wages being higher? Or is it mainly due to extra food costs?
What if we don't increase the minimum wage, but increase the minimum income? Aka give people extra money if they work for minimum wage in certain area's like restaurants. Just a theory. (In NL we have had situation where the company would get extra money to compensate the higher wage cost, mostly the NOW during Covid)
Switzerland does import a lot of its food, so expensive food is definitely part of the cost in restaurants. I don't know what the mix between food costs and labour is. But, high labour costs are part of the expense.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with your minimum income. Are you saying that certain jobs deserve a higher minimum than other jobs? Which jobs are ones where the minimum wage is allowed to be lower? If restaurant minimum wage/income is higher, does that mean that say delivery drivers are paid less?
Minimum income aka, everybody will have their income at a max of say 3k a month. If you work for a boss and you earn 1k there than you get 2k from the government. If you earn 4k you get nothing from the government f.e.
Why not just get 3k a month from the boss? Why should the government subsidize your income so that your boss can pay you less?
We already subsidize companies, but that doesn't always end up in the hand of the employees.
Look, we have to accept that not every company can be profit driven and sustain itself. That can be an issue with wage costs or with other costs. Things like theatres often get money from the government to fill the gap. Companies with old historic buildings often get money from the government to keep those buildings in check. Startups also get helped by the NL government in the form of tax cuts etc.
UBI would also help with edge cases. Or people who cannot work etc. Yes there are also issues with this.
Some companies, sometimes. Sure.
Then they should be allowed to fail. If it's an essential service it should be a government department not a company.
UBI is a good idea, but that's entirely different.
If you give your whole life of working hours to a business, the compensation should be a bare minimum of all of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Period.
Ironically, every level of Maslow's Hierarchy is behind a paywall.
Self-actualization is only a luxury for the rich.
I'd genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like "taxi driver" and "checkout operator" obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of "exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, 'influencer'? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?".
It's about 20%, according to Ricardian Theorems.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they're playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
It depends a bit on what we need strictly necessary to keep people alive and happy. Also we probably only need people to work 6 hours days iirc, it would be the same efficiency. Let's assume there is no money and everybody gets what they need, like when we lived in smaller self sustainable communities.
We would need transport for a lot of things, we also need people to repair that infrastructure. At the same time, we also need more people to do sports to keep healthy, so you need to be able to do that. You don't strictly need a lot for that, but still. We also need things like swimming pools on top of normal education to teach people how to swim (more important in some countries than others)
Don't we also need some way for people to have hobbies etc to keep everybody sane and happy?
I like the thought process of how many people have essential jobs, this also started for me during covid when the Dutch government didn't make concrete lists of what was essential.
I also don't believe that we need more people on the planet, we need less people to help with climate change. Yes we will have issues with the ageing of people, but automation should help fill the gab with when those people retire.
Since 1970, productivity has increased by 86%. That suggests the output of a 40 hour work week in 1970 could be done in under 22 hours with the same inflation-adjusted wage. That's not even considering the productivity increases caused by industrialization in the century before 1970 (though the 40 hour work week in the US wasn't set until 1938).
Admittedly, this is a bit of a naive way of looking at the numbers, but it gives ballpark ideas of how far we might be able to go.
Note that real (inflation-adjusted) pay has only increased 32% in the same time period. This, BTW, is a much more robust argument than saying real pay has flatlined since 1970. Real wages are, in fact, up during that time period, but it's possible the numbers will shift again over time and return to being flat or down. The pay-productivity gap, however, has only been widening with time and isn't going to be fixed without drastic changes in policy.
I agree with your point, but I'll also say fuck the bare minimum. Any business that cannot afford to pay a living wage has no business being in business. Poverty is exploitation.
I'm not good at math, but looking at the chart I think the average is dragged up but the huge spike of $5k+/mo units. You can find places for ~$2k/mo that don't look terrible, assuming the listings on zillow are real. That's still too expensive, but better than the $3700 average on that chart.
"It could be worse!" is extremely small comfort, though.
$2k a month is $24000 a year, almost 40% of your income. That's not sustainable, even if you can find low rent places.
I think the recommendation is 30% of income goes into shelter? Not sure if that's gross or net. You'd want to be making $80k i think, if it's gross.
Anyway, this is all hair splitting. Basic costs are too high, yes.
I live in NY, not NYC, and make $30/hr as a single guy. I live in someone's garage just so I can have a savings/retirement investment...
Rent at a legitimate apartment complex would eat every remaining dollar I had after my other expenses. NY is definitely expensive...
My dad joked that I need to find a wife with 2 jobs if I wanted a house and then paused for a second, doing the math and realizing that's actually true if we were all around the $30/hr mark...
Or you could split the difference and get two wives with one job each.
Or you could get four wives with a part time job each.
Or you get 8 wives with one job each and now you are making profit over the money you need to buy a house.
My point is
True... Math was never my strongest ability...
But I can't even get one partner, let alone a group lol
You just invented inverse polygamy. You're not getting multiple wives because you have a lot of money but because you need a lot of money.
Nah, just the odd man in a female dominant polycule.
Back when it was created, it was enough for a single earner to feed and house a whole family, it should always be compared to that metric and adjusted accordingly.
Yep, a lot of people don't realize 7.25 an hour at 40 hours a week is just about 15k a year. Good luck with that wage anywhere in the US.
I make just over $30/hr plus some bonuses. I'm struggling in a midsize Midwest city. I'd need roommates in NYC to live.
Yeah it just sounds ridiculously high in low cost of living areas where Fox’s faithful all live.
They really do hear this as “look at this outrageous tax on small business owners” instead of “oh look a living minimum wage - that would be good for Timmy when he graduates high school next year.”