Political Memes

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

No, they love unborn babies. Born babies cost the money they want to steal from our taxes.

I'm going to misquote George Carlin here, "if you're preborn your fine, if you're preschool you're fucked".