I agree with you that a single mom should be able to make it on 40 hours a week.
I also believe it's not my fault you got pregnant at 16, didn't do well in school, have a shitty personality, or can't be anywhere on time.
Everyone I know that actually gives a fuck about bettering themselves and have made a couple good choices here and there make far more than min wage.
There are exceptions I will admit, but the vast majority making min wage are young kids, just starting, or fuck-ups. Those who give a shit usually move up pretty fast.
Do you think the immigrant leaves his homeland to get a shitty job in America? Nope. He told his family he was coming here to make a better life.
So the question is, what is the acceptable level of stuff one must possess to make us not feel bad?
Water
Food
Shelter
TV
Cable
DSL
iPad
Automobile
Xbox
A dog
Gambling money
Please add any I missed.
Your list kind of sucks because it focuses on material possessions. If that list were the minimum necessary list for modern life, I would strike DSL, iPad, automobile, x box and gambling money as necessities and budget enough to live close enough to work to avoid the automobile.
My list in order from most to least importance, where the top five items must be met to claim livable wage:
Water
Food
Shelter
Clothing
Healthcare coverage
Eye care
Dental care
Retirement savings
Some discretionary spending money
Kid's necessities for education
Cheap TV
Cheapest cable package
Time for the family
Education savings
After that, we can talk about adding
Automobile
Better cable package
Computer or iPad or both
larger budget for discretionary spending that can be used of for whatever. Gambling if that's your bag.
Better housing
And fuck DSL
If you can agree that people can better themselves then how about incentives to do so? What I saw on NLX's list was jobs but the kind of jobs is important too. Low wage service sector jobs are by and large dead end, low paying and don't have incentives to gain new skills. A lot of progress can be made by expanding affordable skills training programs and JCs to train people for jobs that are currently hard to fill. Such as electrician, automobile service and repair, and others. That's only going to expand the number of well paid people so much. After that, some sort of skilled manufacturing or other high value service jobs need to be added to the economy.
People jump to this idea that somebody is going to be given a job that they don't deserve. How many times have you seen that happen to somebody that isn't related to the owner or top level manager? For myself, I've only ever earned a job when I convinced the employer that I could produce many times in value than my wages. I'm not suggesting giving jobs to anybody, just creating an upwardly mobile path for developing yourself.
Also, what happened to the tradition of on the job training? I read about employers complaining about lack of skilled workers but I rarely read about job training programs. One place where I worked, it was sink or swim for new hires. We were kept so busy that we didn't have the time to train the new person. The outcome was wasteful. We were always short handed and the FNG created problems that pulled one of us away from what we were doing. When I managed a lab, I had to budget 1/2 a full time equivalent worker to train the new person and didn't include the new hire as a FTE for several months and never until the trainer said they were ready. The program was a success in terms of quality and productivity but always was a hard sell to my management who just didn't understand the "training thing".
The country doesn't just need jobs. Places in India have such low wages that it isn't worth investing in equipment. There are coal mines in India where people do all the hauling of coal by hand instead of mechanized equipment. They are paid incredibly low wages and live in grinding poverty. The economy in those areas is stagnant too. There is too little money in the economy to cycle and grow businesses. Is this country going to be better off if unemployed high school grads or GED workers in Akron are shipped off to Texas to work the watermelon harvest for sub minimum wages? And don't tell me about those slacker college grads who are working tables at a local restaurant. They are looking for better work and finding the pickings really slim.
So, its a mix. This country doesn't just need jobs, it needs stable high value creation jobs and a workforce to staff it. If a person settles for a low wage job, then fine. If they want a better opportunity, it has to be there to provide the incentive to gain those skills. If a person has personality or mental health issues, that prevents them from succeeding then help should be available, not as a freebie but because a healthy working person is worth the investment. And finally, to address decline of population and economy in much of the interior of this country, make it possible for those jobs to exist in the heart land so that sustainable multigeneration communities can grow. Multigenerational families provide the best safety net -- extended families are better.
And I'm not talking about government nanny state overseeing this. We paid dearly for the new president. I see no reason why we shouldn't expect him to rise up to this challenge to bring private-public partnership to do this. It is, after all, why he got this job in the first place.
But then again, Donald Trump? Really?
thats one way to further an agenda ; to convince the other side to push it for you. with trump it will be him pushing other country's agendas and maybe the extreme white i mean right or do i mean white
