TIL if you live in Pennsylvania and make minimum wage you'd have to work 105 hours a week to afford a "modest" one bedroom rental.
TIL if you live in Pennsylvania and make minimum wage you'd have to work 105 hours a week to afford a "modest" one bedroom rental.
#OOR23 shows how difficult it is for renters to find affordable housing. Find out how much a renter must earn to afford a modest home at https://nlihc.org/oor
This site has these sorts of stats for each state.
You're viewing a single thread.
A "modest one bedroom" isn't exactly modest - it's a luxury for a single person. Modest would be sharing a studio with several other people.
The federal minimum wage really is quite low (even that shared studio would cost a large fraction of what a minimum-wage worker earns) but I don't think society should be targeting the "lives alone in a one-bedroom" lifestyle as the minimum when sharing a space is a reasonable and much more affordable way to live.
What in the Hooverville is this hot take? Now having a bedroom is a luxury?
Your desire to live in squallor should not be forced on others, you pathetic, unsympathetic piece of shit.
You could have phrased that more friendly, imho
Could have? Yes. Should have? No.
People who are OK with others getting ripped off and having terrible conditions just because they did in the past are scum of the Earth. Literally, they CHOOSE to perpetuate problems. Problems that they identified as problems.
Fuck them, and fuck anyone who defends them. They are literally a detriment to the world.
Edit: Keep in mind, I worded it after reading some of their later replies. They are quite comfortable giving others less because they had a poor upbringing. Preeeetty sure honorable people take the exact opposite lesson when they live through it and learn that squalor shouldn't be acceptable for anyone to deal with.
I said I'm my opinion. I do not agree with that person at all, but to resort to calling them name is a bit far, again in my opinion.
If you want to convince the other of the error of their ways adding insults is not helping getting your point across.
I too read further and was surprised how their poor background somehow formed this rather intense opinion. But that was due to others being more like and asking questions, rather than yelling curse words.
I find disagreement can be conveyed more politely, without losing out on effect. And generally getting mad at people on the internet is rather fruitless and vapid.
Yeah this guy just loves to punch down and doesn't get why they aren't making friends but they have everyone else that's angry happy to root for them because they also want to be angry. It won't work to bring anything together and will just isolate people further.
What a waste of anger.
There's no need to coddle shit people with shit opinions.
and will just isolate people further
Good. Maybe the social consequences of being a shit person will slap them in the face one day.
What an utterly pathetic projection from you. I am not trying to make friends nor am I trying to change their mindset.
They are someone who thinks their suffering justifies others' suffering. If you think that makes them intelligent or worthy or respect, that is a flaw of yourself and your self alone.
If we blend the peasants into a fine paste, imagine how many more we could fit!
Why are you defending both these conditions for people and superyachts? In what way is this good for society? Shall we return to slavery - productivity will skyrocket as labour costs plummet, and you can motivate your workers by beating them nearly to death.
Why are you defending both these conditions for people and superyachts?
I'm a much stronger supporter of the American status quo than most other people here are. It's very good to live in this country, certainly much better than living where I was born in the former Soviet Union. (Middle-class people from there come here to work illegally for very low wages, because even the people with the lowest incomes here have more money than a middle-class person there.) There's room for improvement, but changes should be made slowly and carefully, with an emphasis on not breaking anything. So when someone proposes a policy that would encourage billionaires to leave, I'm against that because it might have unintended side effects on the economy. And when someone has unreasonable expectations about what the minimum wage ought to be, I'm against that too for the same reason.
The new generation of "clean your plate, there's starving children in Africa."
Saying "don't complain because someone else has it worse" is the worst form of bad faith, uneducated argument. You're the problem.
I'm not saying "don't complain". I'm saying "be very careful when making changes to a system that already works better than most." A lot of people talk as if life in the USA is awful and demand radical change. I think it would be a terrible idea to trust them not to break the delicate machinery of our prosperity.
A lot of people talk as if life in the USA is awful and demand radical change
That's likely because for many people the USA is awful and in need of radical change
It's really easy to look at how other countries are doing better than we are at things and learn from them, it's not like any change we try would be some magical untested idea that would break the country in 2
I've got things going pretty nicely for me, so I don't want anything to change unless I'm not as close to the top as I currently am. Change might make me feel less wealthy, and so it scares me.
Ah got it. Totally understandable.
I'm not too concerned about myself - I'll be fine, at least because I can move somewhere else (although I would prefer not to have to learn a third language). I'm concerned about the working poor (my family was when I was a kid) and I don't think people so out of touch that they call a one-bedroom "modest" are well-equipped to judge what the minimum wage ought to be.
(There's no consensus that the minimum wage actually helps people, but if it does then it should be higher. The current minimum wage is effectively no minimum wage at all.)
Man the perks of apathy.
I wish I was that stable and able to be so apathetic as you but nah I'm in the shit house so I just have to stay and try to make things better.
Well I hope you leave soon never look back and get to live your life without giving a shit because you are fine. Have a whatever life my non-comrade
I'm concerned about the working poor
and
Modest would be sharing a studio with several other people. (...) I don't think society should be targeting the "lives alone in a one-bedroom" lifestyle as the minimum when sharing a space is a reasonable and much more affordable way to live.
Aren't compatible positions, and
There's no consensus that the minimum wage actually helps people
is a laughable one - it's one of the most studied topics in economics, and when you put any effort whatsoever into controlling for biases, the evidence is unambiguous.
Billionaires are an active drain on society. They shouldn't exist.
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Their unchecked, unreasonable economic power buys political power that undermines democracy.
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Their resources were snatched from the workers that did the productive labour, disincentivising them from that productive work.
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The huge pools of comparatively idle capital act as a handbrake on the economy, whereas workers would stimulate the economy by spending that money.
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The environmental impact of billionaires and things like their superyachts is absolutely incredible.
...but we'll fuck workers to the point that they can't afford their own shelter to ensure that those billionaires can exist. Again, why?
It's very good to live in this country (...) because even the people with the lowest incomes here have more money than a middle-class person there.
Again, you're defending people being paid wages too low to afford their own shelter. Minimum fucking wage, my guy - because the billionaires will pay people as little as they can get away with - up to and including restoring slavery if given the opportunity.
As for people fleeing one formerly fascist capitalist hellscape for another that's sliding toward fascism? What's this supposed to tell me?
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Modest doesent mean minimal as possible it just means not excessive. What you described isint modest, its a prison cell
"You will have nothing and be happy with it"
"YESSIR RIGHT AWAY SIR!"
Fuck off.
Did your parents share a studio with several other people when they were young?
When I was young, I was in the Soviet Union. I lived with my sister, my parents, and my maternal grandparents in a two-bedroom apartment. We were middle-class family there.
People have to put 2.5x the regular number of hours to afford a single house to themselves. If they wanted to try to spend only 50% of their income on rent (still a stupid ask, but normalized these days.) They would have to share that one bedroom rental with 5 other people! That's a lot of scheduling to keep that one bed free.
I kind of agree that communal-ish living should be more normalized in the U.S. but people should at least have their bedroom free. It's kind of a difficult argument to make when every apartment is built to accommodate one person or a couple and no new property ever gets built with communal living in mind.
Edit: also, the one bedroom apartment is obviously being used as a benchmark here and not as the plutonic goal for renters.
Fuck off Landtoid.
Responses to this comment are why intelligent discussion around this and many topics like it are worthless to have on Lemmy. There is an echo chamber here way larger and more insular than there ever was on Reddit.
The Lemmy hive mind is of a single perspective. It is best to ignore discussion around serious topics on this site, unfortunately.
I mean while I agree with you on the surface, that dude is comparing old Soviet Union life to modern American life... it's pretty obvious those two things are very different.
Oh I completely agree with you. But the comments against it are ridiculous.
For decades, young people lived with roommates yet this is completely ignored. I grew up with roommates. My parents did too. So did their parents. But reading these comments makes it sound like the expectation is to turn 18 and be handed the keys to a 1 BR in a nice area.
Just ridiculous. And every single topic in this site is the same.
I don't know about all that I think most of the angst or anger comes from the fact that they'd have to work like a hundred and something hours a week just to afford a one bedroom.
Right and that is understandable. My point is that if you are working min wage, you can’t afford a 1BR and should live with roommates.