Trump Wants to Lower Poverty Line

San Jose (about 60 miles from San Francisco) is still too expensive for "working poor", I think you'd have to live much more than an hour from San Francisco to survive with a full time minimum wage job. How far from San Francisco can one get in an hour on their BART?

The problem is with the cost of housing, someone in MAGA country could get by fine on $2k/mo, rent is much cheaper in flyover country, plus they've got better family and community support. Transpose the situation to impacted coastal cities and there's just no way to overcome the housing cost. Federal guidelines suggest housing costs not exceed a third of income, there are no $700/mo studios in all of California. California has a slightly higher minimum wage ($11-12/hour). If a crummy studio apartment in Los Angeles or San Francisco is about $3k/mo (it really is), then one would need to earn about $9k to live there. To make about $9k/mo, a full time worker needs to be paid about $56/hour.

The other alternative is to subsidize housing, but this is difficult since property in California is so expensive, and property owners are quite opposed to anything that could devalue theirs. Nobody wants subsidized housing in their neighborhood, tenants in such housing are characterized by their poverty, dependence on public assistance, lack of respect for the property of others, drug and crime problems, all of which reduce the value of property nearby. Urban property in California is very highly regulated, there are strict zoning regulations which are very hard to overcome, someone in San Francisco has been battling the bureaucrats there to enable him to convert a laundromat in the Mission District into a five storey apartment building, five years! I know someone doing something similar in Venice Beach who has been at it for 3 years. There is strong resistance to increasing housing everywhere in California.

 

lowering the poverty line means magically.....less Americans are suddenly poor.

how cute

 

You seriously think someone who works 40 hrs/week at $7.25/hr can afford health insurance and food? Neither would be possible without federal assistance.

 

Well, I don't care what you bet. Poor people have to work more than 40 hrs/week all across America to scrape by.

$7.25/hr after taxes and other deductions will equal about $5.87/hr.

5.87 x 40 = $234.80/week

$234.80 x 4 weeks = 939.2

Expenses:
Rent for a tiny apartment = $500/month
Electric Bill = $25/month (more if you use air conditioning)
Gas Bill = $40/month (can easily be $150+/month in the winter)
Water Bill = $25/month
Groceries = $125/month

Total Expenses: $715/month

This leaves $224.2/month for other expenses.

Does this person have health insurance? Does this person own a car, which requires insurance and gas (and maintenance)? Does this person wear clothes? Etc., etc.

 

Everyone working full time must be provided by their employer Obamacare compliant healthcare coverage absolutely free, there's no charge to the employee, coverage is absolute, universal and unlimited, this is the law (it costs an employer about 6k/year per employee). This is why most employers of unskilled minimum wage workers limit them to under 30 hours a week (which entails no employer healthcare obligation).

 

"Trump Wants to Lower Poverty Line"

I have another idea. Make the minimum wage livable and give everyone a job.

 

Wow. Great info. I sure love living in Florida in comparison. California is just fun to visit for me and that is about it.

 

You can believe that all you want but hardly any do work over 40 hours a week because they share apartments, houses and live with family because they cannot afford to live on their own plus government subsidies.. Nobody making minimum wage lives in their own place. Alot less people work over 40 plus hours a week than you want to believe. It is not because they don't want the money, people just don't want to. They will find ways to survive on that $234.80 a week.

 

You're missing the point, which is that minimum wage is not good enough--especially when corporations make too much money on the backs of the working poor. My numbers were to show that, if someone making minimum wage wants to exist in a Republican survival-of-the-fittest world, they would need to hold two full-time jobs to pay for everything and to save up for retirement.


II ca speak as someone who has lived on both ends of the poverty spectrum. I was young and worked on minimum wage, and I grew up on welfare. As a career man, I was earning almost $200k/yr at one point. I definitely believe that minimum wage is obscenely low and the wealthy make their money on the backs of the working poor. It's a tough life to work hard and have nothing to show for it.

 

I agree 100%. I am just saying that most poor people are not working 40+ hours per week. I know because I am around them all the time. None of any I know does.

 

Ok, but anecdote doesn't mean much. For many people, working less than 40 hrs/week on minimum wage doesn't cut it and a second is necessary to survive.

 

Raising the minimum wage is not a good idea in a tight labor market. People who are looking for work don't have to accept a wage that is inadequate. Advocates for a hike in minimum wage perceive a labor market with just two kinds of people; a huge mass of desperate workers who have nothing and a few very greedy employers seeking to maximize their profit by reducing costs on the backs of their workers. Things are really much more complicated. First off, the employers have tremendous expenses in providing employment besides a worker's wage. At a previous job (years ago), my employer had to pay over $6.5k/year to provide me with the minimum health insurance required by law. Employers have to also provide unemployment insurance, contribute to the workers' compensation fund, social security, there's a payroll tax and 6-8 other state and Federal taxes (they're on everyone's paycheck or in an independent contractor's regularly estimated income submissions).

Additionally, an employer incurs costs training and equipping an employee, uniforms, tools, other equipment and forms that document work. Plus administrative costs in documenting an employee's work, breaks, any overtime and each decision by any supervisors relating to the employment as well as compliance with the numerous regulations from specialized State and Federal agencies with purview in these matters. These agencies conduct inspections to verify compliance and require dedicated staff for that purpose. The equipment and tools must be inspected and approved as compliant with applicable regulations, this has to be documented too and is all subject to inspection as well. Often the whole regulatory compliance and documentation is dispensed with by subcontracting to "staffing agencies" relieving the actual employer and transfering liability for any breach of the regulations.

There's a cost associated with training workers, they need to have specific skills, but also to satisfy the consumer. In the service sector the training needs to result in something quite unpredictable; customer satisfaction. It is not unusual for a duly equipped and properly trained worker to prove unable to handle customer relations. Terminating such an employee results in a loss of whatever was expended in training and outfitting the worker. A new hire also has to work well with the other employees and the employer bears the risk when there are problems (sexual harassment, discrimination or other abuse). Ultimately, hiring a worker is not an easy decision that simply depends on wages.

In an environment profuse with regulations we need to consider the cost of compliance too. Right now it appears the national average of $7.25 an hour is a bearable cost for unskilled and inexperienced workers, data shows there is upward pressure on this figure and some (many) States have implemented a higher hourly wage. With an unemployment rate of only about 4% it appears workers are in the position where they can demand more. I doubt unskilled and inexperienced workers can get over $50/hour (what it would take to barely survive in Los Angeles or San Francisco).

One needs to consider who employs these unskilled and inexperienced workers, some do work for WalMart or McDonalds, but I suspect most are at minor and unknown employers rather than huge multinationals with big dividends. Someone I know in Los Angeles pays a maid $500/wk (cash) for 30 hours on 4 days ($16.66/hr). She does a good job, trustworthy, keeps the house clean and makes breakfast for the kid too), she's married to a sushi chef at a fancy restaurant. My friend has legitimately hired two maids to clean his place (topless) for $50/hour (minimum 2 hours) -this is the market. Why should my friend pay his maid more than $50 an hour?

 

I agree. I think the wages in comparison to the yearly rise in cost of living plus food/gas widens with each year. Minimum wage is the same as it was almost 10 years ago while the expenses have increase 25-50% in many areas.