Minimum wage can no longer afford an 2 bedroom apartment anywhere in the US. - Sensationalist Headlines

socialism

true but that'd be counted as a benefit, can't have those the first and seemingly only responsibility of a corporation is to maximize profits, which is easily accomplished by using wageslave labor which is cheaper than slave labor because you don't have to provide housing or feed them

Except higher doesn't mean better. You have to account for purchasing power. $5 in the 70s has the purchasing power of $33 today. So, 35K as an average for personal income in 1970's CPI is 4.8K. The average back then was 7K for the same demographic. Also the difference between car insurance and a wreck is that one is a annual fee and the other is an emergency. The annual cost can be factored into your yearly budget.

You're right, graves can technically be interpreted as "housing" and it can be perceived as a humanitarian effort to save people time instead of capitalizing on that also, can't have that.

Accidents ("risk") can be accounted for that way too and it's what businesses and advisors do all the time. If insurance is worth it then in aggregate people would be gaining more than lost, which is what this whole topic is about, whether people are better off. (and it brings me back to what I said before, average case vs. bottom %) The chart is CPI-adjusted. That's what "real" means.

Insurance isn't meant for gain, ideally if the whole system is insured no one actually gains, they're only indemnified.

I work a full-time job where I make roughly $23 an hour, but I still can't afford rent in my area, which is why I still live with my parents. Shit's fucked yo.

Kind of. It's a means of risk management primarily, which has its own value, and there are more costs than the direct sticker of an accident (e.g. the disruption into your life and plans.) Also insurance companies don't tend to sit on the money, but they do try to grow it. Although that's a bit semantic.

I've seen a lot of Republicans who complain that minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage or some shit, but that's factually not true. It 100% was meant to be a living wage, and it needs to be updated for the times. Companies should be able to afford it, they won't plummet into the negatives.

That chart doesn't follow the US DOL standard then: CPI Inflation Calculator or check this chart for info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Over_time,_by_ethnicity_and_sex Cpi has actually dipped and never went up, This has been true for the bottom 60% for the past 60 years. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/213360/6163a97a-ff46-4466-812a-9c22a35827d5/WealthPercentiles.gif And the main issue is cost of living has increased past inflation rates: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/101314/what-does-current-cost-living-compare-20-years-ago.asp For example, the Census Bureau reports that the average price of a new home in July 1994 was $144,400. According to the inflation calculator, that price today should be $232,141. The same report places the average sale price for July 2014 at $339,100, however, more than 46% higher than the price when accounting for inflation alone. A gallon of gas in 1994 cost $1.20, making it $1.93 in July 2014, when adjusted for inflation. The actual average price, as of July 2014, is $3.69, nearly twice what it would be if inflation were the only cause for the increase. Taken together, these figures indicate that while the average person is still making the same amount of money when accounting for inflation, prices for many of the daily necessities have gone up considerably, which means that each dollar earned does, in fact, buy less than it did 20 years ago. So the purchasing power is ultimately lower and keeps getting lower every year.

That's usually just some empty point about it being ENTRY-LEVEL work. Tho I don't really like the arguments about whether it was meant to be living or not. That line comes from a quote in the 30s when a minwage was being implemented that today would be about $4 an hour, which back then still wouldn't give you an independent home or support a family, but would count as "living" under an open definition that means just surviving. Nowadays we p. justifiably want something more than just having to huddle with multiple other working people in a small place or homelessness.

Insurance companies exist to profit but the product as it were is meant to “make people whole” and not gains. That said, a physical injury is hard to properly gauge let alone pay out so yeah, kind of. insurance is interesting stuff

So two gov agencies are reporting two different CPI ratings? Taken from World Almanac (in turn sourced to US Census Bureau). Its still from the census like all the data in the almanac. It was just common before the information age to pull that kind of data from the world almanac. It pulls housing as an example, but even gas has increased past inflation rates. A Dose of Financial Reality from this article and his sources from the CPI: In January 1970, the Consumer Price Index was 37.8. In January 2011, it was 220.223. That’s a 482% increase over the period we’re looking at. In other words, for every dollar increase in the minimum wage since 1970, the price of an average item has gone up $1.36. Even adjusting for inflation, a dollar today buys less than it once did for low income earners. So, for a person freshly out of school, the initial income outlook is worse than a fresh graduate in 1970, but after some career advancement, their salaries end up being comparable given inflation.

yes and no, the end user its not meant to be for gain but for the managers of the insurance system there needs to be a modest gain for both risk mitigation and overhead. for-profit insurance adds the need to generate a profit from a managed risk pool though which is where our system fell off the rails as there's just no way to provide healthcare to chronically ill people or cover large expenses routinely without some sort of outside force to reduce their risks. GIECO is a great example, it was setup as an insurance company marketed exclusively to government employees who tended to have lower risk and had higher pay.

I'm right at $20hr for photo and $30hr for video from start to finish as a wedding photographer/videographer. People just don't realize how much time it takes to edit 1,300 photos down to 700-900, or 3-8 hours of video down to about 4-15 minutes, depending on their package and what's actually filmed. The housing cost in Colorado is skyrocketing each year thanks to fucking Commiefornians, who have built a reputation bad enough to where locals are going to cut them off and brake check their asses way more frequently than any other driver. Texans are ass people who visit here all the time which doesn't help either. Goddamn white plate privilege.

This is the biggest "well no shit" things I've read in a while. A 2 bedroom apartment is unrealistic for minimum wage, everyone knows that. Minimum wage isn't for 2 bedroom apartments sorry. That's why most people get roommates and or loved one to help pay.

Not just that, but viewing housing as an investment. That's what's fucking up California and Canada anyway. All the housing is bought up by rich people either: to sit on it and watch the property value rise so you can sell it later, to live in it and watch the property value rise so your family can sell it later or do the same, or to rent out to someone else. In all cases the landowners not only inflate the cost of housing to their own benefit, but oppose the development of any high density and / or low income housing. This is a housing bubble, because demand is not being met, due to artificially high cost. It's very likely that this bubble will pop in the near future, and the value of housing will plummet, many people will lose their homes while others who are better off take the chance to grab their first home. But what else will happen is these investors will buy up as much as they can while the costs are low, because housing is an investment...

It also says its too high for single bed apartments too. you know, what most singles rent out bar studios.

this blog is doing the exact same thing I mentioned about your previous source. Modern CPI-U utilizes housing and gas too Wikipedia is pulling it from them for modern statistics. They also aren't a government agency. The federal reserve took their data from the census too, I haven't looked directly at the census but I'm assuming it doesn't do the deflating for you.

now-a-days, sure. but not too long ago you could

They built this really nice community area with townhomes, starter homes and mcmansions (i hate those) in this area near my house and the starting prices are "in the low 300s!" but thats a townhome and the price gets higher if you want a starter

Deregulation. Greed.

Huge combination of things. The decline of renter's unions, the lack of community care for each other to be able to do stuff like protest this this, the "failure" of public housing that wasn't actually a failure, the lack of local government response to these rents, the increase in 'career landlords', the 2007 crash, and most importantly the stagnation of wages and benefits post 1980s in combination with the scramble overseas causing a loss of proper manufacturing jobs (which was largely caused by the decrease in tariffs major free trade alliances caused, one of the major reason trump was elected coincidentally enough). Wealth has not trickled down, and in fact those wealthy enough have used their wealth to just suck more out of the lower and especially middle classes. It's a massive issue with a ton of factors to it that no one really knows how to or have the time to deal with it and bring awareness to the problem, or even worse is influenced by the landlords to not deal with it, despite how many people it fucks over each day. If you want to read more on the rent crisis and how it's affecting the lower quartile of people, read Evicted by Matthew Desmond, he gives a pretty good overview of just how fucked inner city poor people are...

You guys wanna hear something depressing? My entire family of 8 live in a 2 bedroom townhouse, 3 generations sharing 2 bedrooms and a small living room, 2 sleep on mattresses in the living room. We all work, but there is nowhere else to go and we were very lucky to have found this place bcause our last renter decided to show us the road in order to do some renovations.

Walmart are masters of getting away with serious bullshit. There's a reason their employees have been trying to unionize for over a decade and haven't managed it yet. I don't know exactly how different it is right now but the same apartment complex I got that $1200/month on the first page from had one bedroom apartments for $700/month. Except at the time I was making just above minimum wage and working full time and brought home a whopping $960ish/month. My car insurance at the time was $120 and gas was costing me $40 every two weeks. (And my car was necessary because even by car it still took me 45 minutes to get to and from work even when seriously breaking the speed limit) So after just rent and my basic car costs I'd be left with a whole $60 to pay all my other bills and buy food if I'd moved out at that point in time. A single bedroom apartment working full time should be completely doable even if it means you have a very tight budget. But under those circumstances it wasn't just a tight budget but outright impossible. And that was the cheapest apartment I could find in the right area at the time.

I've basically given up on being independent with these prices. And the job that I was trying to work that would of let me just barely cling to independence drove me to consider suicide on multiple occasions (and ended up calling the hotline one night because I seriously was going to go play in traffic) and actually pushed my health so far down that I likely was going to die before my parents. So now, for the foreseeable future, I've moved in with some roommates who are supporting me while I actually get myself back together, get my health back to something manageable, and actually do something that won't drive me to suicide. As a result, I've conceded that I actually won't ever attain any of my dreams and should just be content with being safe and around people who care about me.

I will say that one thing enabling this turn of events is that most people around my age are moving towards cities rather than smaller towns. No one I know from a city is moving out of it, but almost everyone from my small town is moving to a city. And there are legitimate jobs outside of cities, they're just less common and pay less. But the cost of living is also less. Not that this doesn't also affect small towns, and of course this is probably one of the smallest contributing factors, but it does make me feel bad to see all the towns near me depopulating.

As someone who moved from a city to a smallish town I couldn't be happier. However unfortunately this county is booming so the cost of living is just as much, if not more than LA county.

I'm in the same situation, it sucks to be living at home but rent is just too expensive. Trying to pay off student loans is also a real killer. Plus we're having a lot of new apartment complexes go up around here, and many landlords are now renovating their existing buildings from the 60s and 70s which drives rent up even more. At this point I would rather just keep saving as much as I can and eventually buy a house. At least my parents' house is set up so I more or less have my own living space so I can get away from everyone if I need to. Still not ideal, but at this point it's like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

God I wish that were me. There are six people living in this house including a 2 year old so I get zero privacy.