What does “livable wage” mean?
I hear rats and their cohorts say it a lot. “Livable” for whom? A married college grad with 4 kids ? A never-married high school dropout with 3 kids? A teen working the drivethrough who lives with their parents? A single legislator with a gambling habit? All these people will likely have different opinion for what defines “liveable”.
San Francisco has a minimum wage of $10/hr(highest of any city in the nation). Business owners there also must pay another $1.23 to $1.85 an hour per employee for health-care coverage if they don’t offer health insurance. San Francisco is also the only city in the state that charges a payroll tax of 1.5 percent; it also mandates nine paid sick days annually per employee. And yet they have more panhandlers and homeless than anywhere I’ve recently visited in the US and has the highest rental rates in the country if you exclude Manhatten.
We don’t want to turn our country into Eurofrisco Nice place to visit, couldn’t ever afford to live there.
Good point, in 1971 I worked for a short time at an employment agency. I learned a lot but made very little money there. One fellow in his early forties came in unemployed and looking and wanted me to find him a job with a “livable” income. He told me that he had been, “tryin’ tuh make it on two hunnerd a week.” At that time in South Carolina two hundred dollars a week bought at least as much real estate and groceries as two thousand a week does now but this character claimed he had been struggling to live on that. In reality I doubt that he had ever made two hundred in one week. After he left I told a coworker that if I found a job that guy could qualify for that paid more than two hundred he would never hear about it because I would be applying.