The issue with these assessments of living wage in NY is that, if you're poor and desperate, there are many ways to "live" that, while not particularly desirable to most people, are certainly available. This is true both on the "cost" side (i.e. expenses related to food and housing) and on the "income" side (reported wages).
There is a large, technically illegal, economy to NYC which doesn't appear in W-2s, 1099s or self-reported census income, that most people outside of it generally aren't aware of. I'm not saying that the situation is good, but "60% of New Yorkers are not earning a living wage" is inaccurate. The existence of this grey economy makes it very difficult to measure income and expenses for a large proportion of New Yorkers.
[edit]: As an example, I have a friend who grew up in a working class family in south Brooklyn. His mother's job was "on the books" and his father's construction work was completely off-the-books, paid in cash. Everybody in the family was very aware of the amount of money you could deposit in a bank account, in a given time period, without attracting IRS attention.
Recently, they bought a building in Brooklyn for a low million dollar figure, after pooling together informal loans from family members and friends. But their household was probably below the "living" wage, from the point of view of this data set, for the past 25 years.
From my experiences living in NYC, this seems directionally correct and very difficult to measure.
Tack on that cost of living in NYC varies wildly depending on rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartment arrangements (rent control is more strict than rent stabilization, rent stabilization is more common than rent control). There are millions of New Yorkers living in rent-stabilized apartments, and they might earn enough to live in their current pad but not be able to move somewhere else at market rate.
Similarly, property values have skyrocketed, so people living in homes they bought decades ago might be comfortable, while earning a wage that is technically not "living" by the standards of thhis academic research.
Excellent summary. I have a lot of friends who grew up in rent controlled (in the 1940s law sense) units, and they'd probably be considered "below the living wage" according to these sorts of metrics.
Combine that with the massive informal economy, and it becomes very difficult to perform accurate econometrics on the city as a whole.
If those people living in rent controlled units move, can they find a place with the same rent? Or would they need to move to a different state, away from their friends, family, community and job?
Probably the latter. There are many senses in which it's not ideal; at the same time, I think most people in NYC would happily take a rent controlled unit (if they're not already living in one).
Yep. And what rent-controlled units exist, have huge waiting lists. If you don't like the place, or if your landlord is negligent or an abusive jerk, then too bad, them's the breaks. You're "happy" to take such a place because the alternative is worse. That doesn't mean it's good.
> And what rent-controlled units exist, have huge waiting lists.
It's worse than you're describing.
Rent-controlled apartments have no waiting lists, because rent control is all but phased out. It only exists for a very small number of apartments that have been occupied continuously since the 1971 by the same person or lawful successors (e.g., spouse).
Rent-stabilized apartments are very hard to come by. Not only are they incredibly competitive, but they often require massive broker fees (NYC is one of the few markets where renters are expected to pay the fee for the broker hired by the landlord). So even if you're lucky enough to score a $1000/month rent-stabilized apartment, you may have to pay a broker's fee of $5000 or more[0], on top of the first and last month rent.
[0] this is not an exaggeration; the market has exploded in the last year, and broker's fees are unbelievable compared to even a few years ago
Rent-controlled apartments are indeed basically extinct, but IME rent stabilization has more variance than you're describing: my first independent apartment was rent stabilized, and I didn't have to pay any broker fees. This was in South Harlem.
> IME rent stabilization has more variance than you're describing: my first independent apartment was rent stabilized, and I didn't have to pay any broker fees. This was in South Harlem.
When was this? I'm talking about the state of rent stabilization today - 2023 - not 2021 or earlier.
These days, you might happen to luck into a rent-stabilized apartment, but if you're actively looking for one, you'll be very hard-pressed to actually successfully rent one without paying through the nose.
I just checked, and the same unit has been off-market since 2020 at...$5 less than I was paying for it. Similar units in the building are going for the same rates that they were in 2018.
> Similar units in the building are going for the same rates that they were in 2018.
That doesn't contradict what I'm saying. Rent stabilization limits the amount by which landlords can raise rents (2019 also closed a loophole around preferential rents and vacancies). But that doesn't reflect the actual total cost paid by people who are signing leases for rent-stabilized apartments today.
> off-market since 2020
Yes, warehousing is another widely-reported problem in the last two years.
All new buildings that took advantage of 421a tax breaks are required to be rent stabilized, so they aren't that rare, just close to market rate right now
The null hypothesis here is that your rent controlled (or stabilized) landlord is worse than your average New York landlord, which is debatable!
There's all kinds of context being missed here: rent controlled units tend to be in pre-war buildings in very nice neighborhoods, because that's where the housing was built in that era. They're also frequently in co-op or condominium-owned buildings, where the owners took the building private but still have to respect the pre-private holdout leases. They also tend to be larger than their non-controlled price-point equivalent, because they weren't chopped up during housing boom cycles.
Is it an unequivocal dream? No, for the reasons you said. But for every single family I know, it's a fantastic deal and an opportunity to live and access things that would otherwise be far outside of their means.
this is even worse, it's not for the city but the whole state. How can you perform a study that dumps, say, Manhattan and Rochester into the same dataset is unclear to me.
Almost all of the red sections are outside of NYC. They don't have access to this NYC underground economy. Though The Bronx and Queens are some of the worst-affected areas, Erie and Rochester come up right behind.
The racial and ethnic slant is also hard to miss. If the NYC underground economy is indeed the only thing keeping minorities afloat, that means the economy is dependent on exploiting minority communities (keeping them working in illegal ventures, preventing upward mobility).
If you select the Finger Lakes region (5 hours away from NYC), and then select Race-Ethnicity, it couldn't be starker. Workers of Color lights up most of the map in red, with a median income of $16.80-$25.00. Select White Worker, and it's very light red and mostly green, centered around the city, with $21.48-$32.49. White people do well and everybody else struggles.
Yep, if we zoom into the NYC area and filter by "Employer does not provide health insurance", this gives you a better picture. In addition, many of the people would not state that they're employed, FWIW.
I agree that the "greater" economy is dependent on the grey economy, which is often exploitative-without-recourse. It's a big issue. I guess I'm trying to say that it's important to analyze the greater economy as-is, not just the easily-measurable economy.
> If the NYC underground economy is indeed the only thing keeping minorities afloat, that means the economy is dependent on exploiting minority communities (keeping them working in illegal ventures, preventing upward mobility).
Any business that can't afford to pay their workers a living wage and needs to exploit minority communities to stay open should be shuttered. No point letting them keep their failed business at the expense of everyone else. Companies who have been exploiting workers and pocketing the extra profits should either stop exploiting people and just pocket a little less profit or go out of business already and get out of the way so someone more competent can fill public's need for the good/service they offered.
This is how I feel about the whole argument against minimum wage increases. Can't figure out a way to pay your employees a living wage and stay in business? Close your business and good riddance, I don't care if you employ 10 people or 10,000.
While I generally agree, I wouldn't put that much emphasis on the racial divide ( that it's real ), in NYC it's much more a question of green than black vs white.
SOME "White people" do very well, there's an huge population of "white people" in the Bronx and Queens, the few who "make it" go to other boroughs/neighborhoods the others stay or go back to where they came from, which means the Midwest for a large portion of them.
Also, public workers in general have done quite well for themselves and that includes a lot of black people and some latinos. So while I somewhat agree with you, this very race focused take distorts the reality quite a bit.
> this very race focused take distorts the reality quite a bit.
I think you might be - whether intentionally or not - avoiding considering the factual evidence here. The whole point of this map is to be physical evidence to show that there is, based on actual evidence, which you can see on a map, a strong racial bias.
Do some white people also suffer? Yes. Do more people of color suffer than white people? Yes. Here's more proof, to go along with all the other studies done over decades.
>The racial and ethnic slant is also hard to miss. If the NYC underground economy is indeed the only thing keeping minorities afloat, that means the economy is dependent on exploiting minority communities (keeping them working in illegal ventures, preventing upward mobility).
Or, alternatively, that the tax structure of the area is so abusive that the economy depends on tax evasion.
> If the NYC underground economy is indeed the only thing keeping minorities afloat, that means the economy is dependent on exploiting minority communities (keeping them working in illegal ventures, preventing upward mobility).
The flip side of the coin is that there's a reason people work in illegal ventures: making them fully legal would make them uneconomic, because of a combination of taxes and regulations, and also hurt upward mobility. You see that in places like France, where the youth unemployment rate tends to fall in the 20-25% range. (Though that too gives an overly negative representation of the state of things: France also has a significant shadow economy, so things aren't actually as bad as they might look there.)
It's a game of tradeoffs. What's probably ideal is to move as much as possible into the formal economy, regulate only those things which you can actually afford to regulate and enforce, and tax to the extent you don't drive things underground or out of jurisdiction.
I'm not sure the argument that regulations are the cause of decreased social mobility is valid. Germany who have regulatory framework much closer to France than to the US, has lower youth unemployment than the US. The US in general has quite low social mobility compared to many more regulated economies (e.g. the Scandinavian countries typically rank amongst the highest on social mobility despite strong regulations).
Rankings (particularly by ideological organizations) need to be taken with a large grain of salt, but Heritage has a ranking of regulatory/economic freedom of different countries:
In it, Denmark > Sweden > Norway > Germany > USA >>> France. The low ranking of the US in particular might be for partisan reasons (i.e. intentionally overstating regulatory burden), but Scandinavian countries, although having large governments, typically have relatively low and transparent levels of regulation and efficient tax systems.
Social mobility is a term of art that doesn't mean what people intuit it does.
I think the question being asked here is "how easy is it to significantly increase your income", which has an inverse correlation with social mobility. The reason for this is that high social mobility is most commonly an artifact of wage compression. Scandinavia has high wage compression, and the US very low wage compression, hence why it is much easier to significantly increase your income in the US than Scandinavia despite lower social mobility.
The racial and ethnic slant is also hard to miss. If the NYC underground economy is indeed the only thing keeping minorities afloat, that means the economy is dependent on exploiting minority communities (keeping them working in illegal ventures, preventing upward mobility).
You nailed it, only it applies to most of the country and not just New York. The shoddy enforcement and looking the other way is the cost of doing business. Enforce too much and it collapses.
I find it hard to believe that the amount of tax fraud in NY is enough to throw this figure off. Even if what you're describing is true, it would hardly be "the actual problem" here.
I'm a native NYer, and the GP's comment is largely correct: tax fraud and "informal" (meaning under-the-table) pay is more or less the norm for broad swathes of the city's service and contracting industries.
Every job I ever had in high school was paid under the table, and this is true for my family members as well. It's also normal to not pay sales tax in the city at smaller cafes and every bodega; this is normally passed off as a "cash discount," but it's conspicuously 8.875% rather than the normal credit processing fee.
All that being said: this doesn't necessarily contradict the claim that large numbers of New Yorkers aren't making a living wage. Under-the-table agreements enable wage suppression/theft and make it more difficult for the city to use its labor laws to protect workers.
I've lived in NYC in the past and informally had discounts of 5-15% for services by paying cash, nothing declared, no receipts. Years long relationships with a mechanic or handyman can net some pretty deep discounts if they know you won't be a problem about billing disputes.
Yes, this is my experience as well. I've been doing business with some of the same people my entire life, and "cash only, no receipts, discount between friends" is the norm.
That and there are a TON of small (and not so small) businesses in NYC that are cash only or will not accept cards for transactions under $5 or $10 (and have a majority of transactions that are under that threshold).
I remember being absolutely shocked when I went to a super duper hole in the wall place in Dallas that I was _sure_ was cash-only and discovered that they not only accepted cards, but their POS supported NFC!
> It's also normal to not pay sales tax in the city at smaller cafes and every bodega; this is normally passed off as a "cash discount," but it's conspicuously 8.875% rather than the normal credit processing fee.
For what it's worth, I live in NYC and have never experienced this. Lots of smaller places give cash discounts, but in my experience it's in the range of 3–4%, which sounds like a CC fee.
Which part do you live in? This was the norm in the neighborhood I grew up in (north of UWS), as well as everywhere I've lived (Harlem, north Brooklyn).
I wouldn't expect it to be the norm in areas where the foot traffic might pay credit cards by default; I think it's mostly in areas where cash business comes first anyways.
Edit: I wish people wouldn't downvote you. It's a massive city, and it's entirely possible to never experience this!
That tracks with my experience: I've never received a tax discount for paying in cash downtown. I think some of that has to do with who owns the real estate: ownership tends to be corporate and structured downtown, so businesses' finances tend to be correspondingly more accountable and "by the books."
I have definitely received larger than 3-4% discounts (5% is pretty common, I've even seen 10%). At the time I had a pretty long discussion about reasons with my friends, but there's a lot of illegal and legal reasons to prefer cash: (a) you can pay employees quicker since credit cards don't disburse funds immediately, (b) you can pay employees "under the table" i.e. ignoring income taxes, (c) you can pay off your suppliers faster (as above), which is really useful for businesses with poorly documented credit (i.e. receiving net 30 or no credit). Depending on the use of the cash, I could see it being economically valuable to offer even a 15% discount (for illegal use) or 5% (for legal, CC processing + credit reasons).
To be clear, I've definitely seen higher than 4%, just not frequently. What I have personally never seen is a discount of exactly 8.875%, I would have noticed that!
Do you have a local coffee place that'll sell you a coffee for 2.75 instead of 3.00 if you pay cash? That's the kind of thing I'm thinking of (and that's normal in the neighborhood I currently live in.)
An 8% sales tax on food at bodegas is arguably a regressive consumption tax anyway, so I think it's fine consider this legitimate and ethical civil disobedience in response to inhumane living conditions.
Snippet from my reply to a similar sibling comment:
Sorry, I'm not meaning to say that people aren't getting paid enough. My phrasing choice of "actual problem" was poor. I'll leave it up so this thread makes sense.
My intended point was: if we want to understand whether peoples' lives are sustainable with their present wages in NYC, we should be measuring their actual wages, which is inclusive of this grey economy, unlike the reported data source.
The amount of "tax fraud" required to impact the figure is less than one might imagine, because the "living wage" standard is quite low.
That's fair, but your post might have been more prescriptive than you intended. Your wording insinuates that New York doesn't actually have a problem with incomes relative to cost of living because most people make up for that through an informal economy. There is ambiguity, granted, but on the surface that looks like a massive stretch. The figure might be impacted, but for it to be completely eclipsed is another order of magnitude entirely.
You're right! I went ahead and edited it to hem closer to my original intent.
I totally agree that NY has a significant (income:cost of living) problem.
My main objective was to draw attention to the difficulties in measuring the size and distribution of this problem, caused by the unmeasured informal economy and unbalanced access thereto.
I definitely don't think that the informal economy makes up for low reported wages, but it definitely is a ballast that we'd be better off understanding, given its scope and entrenchment.
I (obviously) lack the data to back up GP's assertion, but anecdotally I've seen very similar things happen in South Brooklyn: the husband working a low-paying blue collar job on the books, while the wife worked at a nail salon off the books; or the husband taking in an NYPD pension while working security off the books, getting paid in cash. In both instances, the families rented out the other units in their buildings, also accepting rent payments in cash (and not reporting them).
I was a first date with a woman from a dating site who unleashed her opinions on how unfair it is that the rich evade taxes, and then later dropped that she was in such an arrangement where she rented a spot at a hair salon and was paid entirely in cash and reported almost none of it, while drawing social services for her and her kid.
You should. The thing that makes European social democracies work is that everyone is in it together and buys into the system. When you chip away at that universality—when you say that some people should be able to put their personal self interest ahead of the system—the social trust collapses.
Our au pair from Germany paid the same total tax rate on her entry level, non-university required office job back home as we paid on a mid six figure income in Maryland. That’s what makes their system work.
> The thing that makes European social democracies work is that everyone is in it together and buys into the system
That's far from true. If we talk about percentage of income, the lower and middle classes subsidise everyone else. There are many legal ways to avoid (not evade, which is illegal) taxes if you have enough upfront capital and that is practiced by every big company and upper-class household regardless of location. There are also lots of ways through corruption, lobbying and under-the-table payments or other favours to unjustly enrich oneself at the expense of the taxpayer if you have the right connections.
European countries still "work" but that's more due to inertia and the system is starting to break down; the pandemic accelerated it and we're starting to see the first systemic failures such as the UK (well not technically Europe anymore, but the stage has been set long ago when they were still in the EU).
Short of a few outliers such as some Nordic countries that appear to have figured it out (at least for now), everyone else is in the same boat. Europe just enjoys more inertia but it's just a matter of time.
In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the top tax rates kick in at just 1.3-1.6x the median income. They all rely heavily on VAT, which is regressive. All have low corporate tax rates, and apart from Denmark, they also have competitive capital gains tax rates.
“Living wage” isn’t a self reported statistic based on whether people think they can afford a nice house and UberEats.
I couldn’t easily find the exact formula for this study but it’s usually based on necessities. For example I checked a popular living wage calculator from MIT for the county I grew up in. Food was listed at $9 a day.
By that logic every homeless person is earning a living wage.
Living wage doesn't mean you'll die if you don't make that, it means you can't afford to support yourself and will require additional resources--often from government assistance.
So the same people pushing "living wage" are also calculating "excessive cost of government" like zoning restrictions and property taxes? No, it's just deliberately misnamed propaganda tool.
The term living wage has been around for well over a hundred years. What term would like them to use? Minimum wage already has a specific meaning.
We already have well established term for the concept that everyone understands. Do you want people to change their vocabulary because a word offends you?
> The term living wage has been around for well over a hundred years.
Pretty sure that "living wage" means something very different today than 100 years ago, the term isn't the same if the definition changes.
"Decent wage" is a much better word since it shows how arbitrary it is. The headline should be "Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a decent wage". That word makes sense, since they choose "living wage" to be the amount you require for a decent living, "decent wage" seems much more appropriate for the wage you need for a decent living.
Living wage is the amount of money required to meet all your needs without government assistance.
“Needs” is the part that has changed. $2k a year in healthcare wasn’t likely included 100 years ago, but most people would consider that a need now.
When I checked the MIT living wage calculator, it listed $600 a month in rent. That’s just barley enough for 1 bedroom apartment with a roommate with 1 person sleeping in the living room.
100 years ago you could likely find some large dormitory style living in a death trap building with inadequate exits. But today short of illegally filling a single family unit with too many people a, single bedroom apartment with a roommate is pretty close to minimum shelter.
“Decent wage” to me implies more than the minimum possible shelter and $9 a day for food. But the point is living wage is an already established term of art that means basically the same thing it always has.
When you almost tripled your income, you surely started saving more though, right? It's not really living paycheck to paycheck if you're putting away savings.
The multimillionaire in the mansion down the street lives paycheck to paycheck too - he's got a lot of homes and properties to maintain - but if he loses his job he has millions in assets to cushion him. It's not the same thing as someone making $30k living paycheck to paycheck.
> When you almost tripled your income, you surely started saving more though, right?
You'd be surprised how many people don't in this situation. I've known people that earned $200k+ for years with essentially no assets because they spent it all.
my partner managed to save up over a period of a year until their car died, and had to spend all their savings buying a used one (the most they could afford) which will probably not last long. they also spend a majority of their income paying off debt, mostly the monthly minimum on credit cards they ill-advisedly used to pay rent when they lost their job. being poor is expensive.
> mostly the monthly minimum on credit cards they ill-advisedly used to pay rent when they lost their job.
What is advised in that situation? Homelessness? A lot of people found themselves dealing with that during the pandemic and they ate up all their savings and/or ran up debt just to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables. If I had found myself in that situation I'd probably have broken the lease and moved in with friends/family but not everyone has others who they can depend on to take care of them like that.
Additionally, it would appear that the Cornell data set, coming from the Census Bureau, suffers from the typical problem in most of these data sets -- it is income only, not income net of taxes and transfers. About 1/2 of the US population pays no direct income tax, and of that 1/2 many receive a large share of transfer from government in the forms of Medicaid, food stamps, EITC, etc. After taking into account all of those non-taxes and transfers, this group is much better off than a lot of the publicly available data sets would indicate. This is mostly due to the difficulty of getting all of that information together on each individual in the data set, whereas looking at a reported W2 value is comparatively easy.
Yeah, it's still a problem, but the problem is with the powers that be that set the rules for what it means to live officially. The wages are less of a problem here than the theft by government of the fruits of ones labor.
The wages payable are still at the mercy of what the market will bear. If these people could not find a way to live officially, in many cases it's highly unlikely that the wage could rise to cover their cost of living and the taxes to be paid, meaning the job would no longer exist.
At the end of the day, you can't tax a society into prosperity. Every tax dollar spent needs to be justified on an ROI for society.
It's many problems. It's not a simple situation because it's one that has evolved over many generations. Is it working people defrauding the government? Is it the government abrogating it's responsibility to manage the economy and tax people fairly and provide effective services to the community? Is it a haven for criminality of a more sinister and even violent kind that inhabits the grey economy and turns it black? All of the above, but it's hard to reform because the people who live this way and suffer many of the disadvantages that result from it are also deeply complicit in it's operation.
> The issue with these assessments of living wage in NY is that , if you're poor and desperate, there are many ways to "live" that, while not particularly desirable to most people, are certainly available.
I came here to say this is merely evidence that a lot of people are willing to put up with a lot of BS to live in NYC. If it wasn't "worth it" to them - for whatever reasons that may be - they'd be living elsewhere.
I hear this a lot. I'm inclined to share the sentiment for the young student going to NYU, the intern at a museum/art gallery, or the actor waiting tables while auditioning and doing off broadway. They made a choice, and clearly think the city can offer them enough to deal with poverty and desperation.
I'm less inclined to share the sentiment about people that were born and raised in NYC and have their entire social network there. They had less choice in the matter, and they might be even more desperate if they lost connection with their social support group. In addition, many people born and raised in NYC are missing skills that would be considered essential almost anywhere else in the US, such as how to drive a car.
Regardless of how/why someone arrived in NYC, the prosperity of it's population is a direct concern of cities. The income of it's tax payers directly correlates to a city's tax base, and we've seen what happens when a city's tax income falls short of projections. Poverty and desperation also seem to go hand in hand with expensive problems (for the city) such as crime and poor public health.
> I'm inclined to share the sentiment for the young student going to NYU, the intern at a museum/art gallery, or the actor waiting tables while auditioning and doing off broadway. They made a choice, and clearly think the city can offer them enough to deal with poverty and desperation.
Perhaps I missed these personas in the original article, but these are very charitable examples of "poverty and desperation". Most people interning at museums and art galleries (in my experience) come from families who can at least afford to subsidize the cost of living in NYC. Waiting tables while auditioning and doing off broadway is actually a pretty decent way to earn a living - I had/have friends who have been doing that for 15-20 years and earn solid incomes, in some cases enough to raise a family. I went to nyu, and while it was a while ago, I'm told that if anything, NYU students are more privileged than they were when I went there.
The real examples of poverty and desperation are the immigrants who are effectively forced to work in sweatshop conditions, or the women who pick up hours here and there in childcare in their neighborhood, or the security guards who live out of their cars or in homeless shelters because they don't get paid enough to end up in a stable living environment.
In some cases, they don't have a network outside of NYC they could lean on, or don't have the resources to get to another city, or are (justifiably) scared of what would happen when they got there.
Yeah but those “reasons” aren’t necessarily appealing ones. My uncle and cousins moved to Queens a few years ago when they immigrated to America. It’s not because they love the nightlife and going to MoMA. It’s because that’s where the Bangladeshi community is—the folks who can help find a low paying service job with limited English skills or knowledge of America.
New York City’s population is actually declining if you exclude international migration—I.e. if you focus on the people who have realistic choices about where to live.
Ah yes, the classic "if you can't afford it then move out" meme. Who will collect garbage? Who will serve tables? Who will do all the jobs that most people would hate to do and we pay them peanuts for it?
When money is so tight who has time to take off to go interview at jobs 2hrs away and afford the money to commute to the interview? Who has the time go look at apartments 2 hrs at when you're working 2-3 jobs?
Why is it so difficult to recognize there's a systemic problem?
Clearly, business owners still have access to low income labor, otherwise there would be no one serving the tables or collecting the garbage. If employers can't find staffing, they can raise wages to make their job offers more attractive.
> If it wasn't "worth it" to them - for whatever reasons that may be - they'd be living elsewhere.
Moving can be extremely costly and people who don't earn a "living wage" probably aren't traveling to see if the grass is greener somewhere else.
I've been watching Louis Rossmann's saga for a few years and it has been interesting to see what it took to get him to finally leave NYC. And I'm sure he had far more means to leave than most.
...or a job ...or a business ...or a family ...or a disability ...or an ongoing education ...or economically valuable connections ...or long term contracts etc. For many people, there's much more to moving than just physically relocating people and possessions.
This raises the point that I don't think gets enough attention: taxes for many are a barrier towards life goals. For some like the folks you mentioned, it's a barrier to putting a roof over your head or buying your first home. For others, they can afford housing, but taxes are the difference between being able to save for retirement or not.
That's not to say that there aren't things of value we get for our taxes, but there are a LOT of ways that our taxes are squandered, especially at the federal level, which sadly is the largest chunk of taxes. We all pay the most in federal taxes and get the least in return for federal taxes. State taxes are the second most paid and we get see benefits from them than federal but less than local. Local taxes are often the least amount but the most likely to be spent on things that actually benefit you personally.
We could help everyone make better progress towards life milestones like owning housing and saving for retirement if we collectively held government accountable for how it spends our taxes and reduced taxes across the board.
In general, "not having enough money" is a barrier towards life goals, whether that's from the taxman, rent, commuting costs, fuel, wage suppression, wage theft, or whatever.
> taxes are the difference between being able to save for retirement or not
In countries with state pensions, some of the taxes are saving for retirement.
There's a lot to be said for the idea of reducing the friction of income taxes and shifting instead to property or land value taxes, though. It's a lot harder to conceal a building or move it offshore.
> In countries with state pensions, some of the taxes are saving for retirement.
It's only saving for the retirement of government workers at the expense of the private sector. That's pretty clearly theft. There should be absolutely no government programs give benefits to only government workers paid for by non-government workers. You're basically robbing Peter to pay Paul.
But people who work for the government are, separately, entitled to have an employer-run pension scheme which pays some of their income as deferred compensation in a pension scheme. I don't think it would be more efficient to insist that they take out a private retirement scheme (is this "401k" in US-speak?) and then have to pay them more in the present in order to fund it.
Eh, a huge percentage of the population pays no federal income tax at all. They pay payroll taxes, but they also get a specific benefit from those taxes, it doesn’t disappear into some black hole of defense spending or whatever.
If you instead choose to selectively enforce the law, political power is transferred from the legislative to the individuals who selectively enforce the law.
Manhattan is 1/5th of NYC by municipality, and about 1/6th of the city by population. It's historically the wealthiest borough, so it's not particularly surprising that its residents would have a higher-than-average living wage attainment percentage.
New York City is composed of five boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough is coextensive with a respective county of New York State.
That may be a problem with the assessment but I don't see how that allows you to redefine what "the actual problem" is. To me it still very clearly seems to be that people don't get paid enough? Even the grey economy you mention is caused by that actual problem, is not a replacement of it.
Sorry, I'm not meaning to say that people aren't getting paid enough. My phrasing choice was poor.
I mean to say, it's very difficult to inform policy from data with big inaccuracies.
I'd say the grey economy is caused by myriad issues. But it's a space where people are able to meet their needs (on the employer and employee sides). Even though most of us on this forum wouldn't accept those conditions, hundreds of thousands of people do. It's a nuanced issue that requires a lot of thought and research, before jumping to conclusions about whether it's bad or not.
Anyways, IMO, if we want to understand whether peoples' lives are sustainable with their present wages in NYC, we have to measure their actual wages, which is inclusive of this grey economy, unlike the reported data source.
Not really. I mean if you want to have a stupendously high bar of confidence, and continually raise it so that no action is ever necessary or possible, then yes you need to spend many more years to understand every nuanced economic detail.
For me idk, I've lived a lot of my life in poverty and on the edge of it, and large swathes of my social and family communities still do. I don't need more proof. It's very obvious that most workers are not compensated adequately and this data confirms it unless you really really don't want it to.
I agree that we don't need the full picture to take meaningful action.
I thought it was important to bring attention to the grey economy aspect, because so much of NYC would literally not function at all without it, and its existence and scale does have a meaningful impact on how you interpret this report (i.e. that the report is directionally correct, but its unbelievable magnitude is evidence that we can't reduce something as complex as poverty to a single number, especially when that number is essentially employee and employer-reported income).
This economy exists, but I think it's still arguable whether the people you're talking about are "earning" a living wage.
Setting aside the measurement problem, consider 2 households:
- household A takes in (1+C)X dollars of W2 income, keeps X after taxes, and steals Y = CX/(1-C) to get to the "living wage" level of income.
- household B makes X + Y in off-the-books cash, and thus doesn't pay C(X+Y) in taxes.
Both have the same take-home pay. Household A steals the same amount household B saves from tax fraud/evasion. We wouldn't say that household A "earned" their living wage, even if we could measure it. If Y of their income is ill-gotten, it isn't "earned". Neither should we say that the household B is "earning" their take-home pay amount. Meanwhile, they're benefiting from a government which is subsidized by their more law-abiding neighbors. Said otherwise, for the same level of state + city per-capita spending, their neighbors could have a lower tax rate if the illegal economy were smaller.
We casually like to think that not paying taxes is victimless, but this is an illusion; the victims are literally everyone who is paying taxes.
Are they? Is the government actually benefiting the people we are talking about, on net? I strongly suspect that the answer to that question is "no". And if that is the case, the people who aren't paying taxes could justly respond that the people who are paying taxes are enablers, keeping a government in existence that does not provide the benefits the taxes are supposed to be paying for.
If you disapprove of the way funds are being spent, the appropriate response is to campaign and vote for what you think are more reasonable policies.
Saying that tax-payers are the criminals by propping up a system with abuses is just as nonsensical as saying that non-thieves are criminals for propping up a system of property rights which creates abuses.
NYC has persistently been an economic hub and a place where people sacrifice a lot to live and work. NY as a state and NYC both have quite significant public spending. I think on a per-capita basis, the NYC municipal budget alone is is in the range of ~$11k/head and the state budget is another $10k/head. Do you think those facts are unrelated? If you look at NYC's evolution over history, it has repeatedly needed active government programs to make a dense city function, and to actively support trade, commerce and finance. In the absence of coordination and expenditure, I think Manhattan's growth would have been capped by sanitation issues or the limited water supply centuries ago. There are plenty of places (most) in the country with lower per-capita public expenditure, but none of them have succeeded in creating NYC's economic success. Do you think that's an accident?
> the appropriate response is to campaign and vote for what you think are more reasonable policies.
What if this persistently fails to work?
> it has repeatedly needed active government programs to make a dense city function, and to actively support trade, commerce and finance
It is possible that active government programs are the only way to make a dense city function. But that's not the same as saying dense cities are the best way for people to live.
> none of them have succeeded in creating NYC's economic success
I'm not sure that's true. For example, according to Wikipedia [1], in 2009, the NYC metro area was ranked 10th in per capita GDP. Some of the higher ranked areas are familiar, such as the Bay area and the Boston metro area; but also ranked higher than NYC were Midland, Texas (ranked #1), Des Moines, and Elkhart, Indiana. So I don't think it's a slam dunk that the best way to create economic success is to have a hugely dense city with active government programs.
> none of them have succeeded in creating NYC's economic success
Economic success for whom? According to Wikipedia [1], in 2019, New York had the highest Gini coefficient of all 50 states (Puerto Rico was higher but it's a territory). The point under discussion is not whether NY state and NYC's public spending benefits the successful people in NY state and NYC; I'm quite willing to take it as given that it does. The question is whether it benefits, on net, all the people, not just the successful people.
Conversely, how can we blame the government for failing to provide the benefits taxes are supposed to fund when people are cheating on their taxes? The reality is that tax cheaters are stealing not from the government, but from other citizens: cheaters and honest folk alike benefit from social services, but the latter pay for them.
> cheaters and honest folk alike benefit from social services
You can't just help yourself to this claim since it is precisely this that I am disputing. If in fact nobody is actually benefiting from government services, then the problem isn't "cheaters" who don't pay their taxes, the problem is "enablers" who do--thereby giving money to a government that is failing to do what it's supposed to do.
> If in fact nobody is actually benefiting from government services,
And my point is this is patently false. Would you be okay if the NYP announced that it would not enforce or police crimes perpetrated against Chinatown businesses because of widespread tax fraud? If you truly believed if what you wrote, you would not care: the government isn't providing any service then this should be a non-issue, the government didn't provide any services so this announcement is a no-op.
Of course such a proclamation would be heinous, because contrary to your insistence that the government doesn't provide services they absolutely do provide critical services. The reality is that people just don't want to pay taxes and are using their frustration with what they perceive to be government inefficiency or corruption as justification for their tax fraud.
The fact that the NYP doesn't announce that it's not policing crimes that it should be policing, does not mean that it actually is policing crimes that it should be policing. Again, you can't just help yourself to the claim that the government actually does what it's supposed to do. Nor can you just assume that it must be because of how you expect that people would respond to some hypothetical announcement.
So you'd be totally fine if the NYP made an official announcement: "As of today any crimes perpetrated against Chinatown businesses will not result in law enforcement response." I'm talking in terms of real, concrete actions. You'd genuinely be okay with the government singling out this community and making it clear that it's fair game for criminals to target this community?
Just as an example. Like I said, you should be totally unfazed by the NYP saying "we won't enforce any crimes against Chinatown businesses" if you truly believe that New York isn't providing any social services.
"nobody is actually benefiting from government services"?
Do you suppose New Yorkers drink tap water? It tastes pretty good. I recently learned that still the longest tunnel in use is the Delaware Aqueduct, built in 1945, which brings water to NYC from a series of reservoirs. It runs 85 miles and terminates in Yonkers. Even decades later, and after China's spectacular building projects, it hasn't yet been surpassed. The reservoirs have to be actively monitored and administered to keep the water quality high. For 8.8M people even the most basic necessities of life depend on government services, and on creating and maintaining massive infrastructure.
You can argue that public spending is inefficient, dysfunctional, at times inhumane, but people live in NYCHA housing, go to schools including the CUNY system. They certainly ride transit, use the parks. NY recognizes a right to shelter, and while the system needs a lot of improvement, it does get a lot of people into supportive housing. To claim that _none_ of those people benefit seems like quite a stretch.
> the problem is "enablers" who do--thereby giving money to a government that is failing to do what it's supposed to do.
I'm confused about what you even think government _is_ supposed to do. But if you agree that government does have a role and responsibilities to fulfill, I definitely don't understand how you are actively blaming tax-payers. What do you think _not_ paying taxes will accomplish?
To this point, I dated a Russian girl from Brooklyn whose family had all their medical, dental, cosmetic, car repair, etc. work done by an extensive network of unlicensed Russian immigrants operating out of their apartments and garages. All cash obviously. I'd have never known it existed.
> There is a large, technically illegal, economy to NYC which doesn't appear in W-2s, 1099s or self-reported census income, that most people outside of it generally aren't aware of
Can you say some more on what this means? (I'm an outsider, and have no idea!)
This exists in many places, it's not unique to New York City. In general what this means is one of three things:
1. Cash businesses that don't report income for taxation, so get to make effectively 40-50% more income from their revenue. In this case, I am using the term "business" to refer any income-generating activity for which you are not employed by another person. Yes, this counts the dude selling loosies.
2. A business which is itself illegal because of the nature of what you are selling. This could be as deep as narcotics, or as simple as trucking in cigarettes from out of state so you can sell them at a street news stand and pocket the difference in what would be otherwise taxes going to the state/city.
3. Being paid under the table, this includes things like illegal immigrants working on construction crews, as hotel maids, and back of house in restaurants, getting paid out at the end of the night on a daily basis ("day labor") in cash, never reporting any income for tax purposes.
Generally speaking, when someone says "illegal economy" in a place like New York City, what they mean is the sort of petty tax evasion that naturally occurs amongst immigrant communities and the poor who would otherwise not be able to afford to reside/live there if they paid their taxes in full. New York City is effectively the highest taxation regime you can live in within the US. Major metros in California come close, but are not quite there. If you avoid every tax except sales tax, you can significantly improve your income potential at lower wages. It's the difference between taking home $17/hr or taking home $12/hr after tax, that extra $5/hr is nothing to be sneezed at, and amounts to an extra $10k/yr in your pocket if you work enough hours to be considered "full time" (which in the illegal economy usually means multiple "jobs" or hustles).
> 1. Cash businesses that don't report income for taxation, so get to make effectively 40-50% more income from their revenue. In this case, I am using the term "business" to refer any income-generating activity for which you are not employed by another person. Yes, this counts the dude selling loosies.
Common out here in flyover country, too. Anyone without a shop sign dominated by a large corporate logo is likely to tell you they'd prefer cash, and may offer a cash discount. Cleaners, mechanics, plumbers, even daycares (this is how poor folks can afford daycare: your cousin's friend is staying home with their kid and will watch yours, too, for 1/4 what a licensed daycare would charge, if you pay cash) all of that sort of thing, tons of people doing a fair amount of off-the-books work. You might have to chat with them a little first, but it's usually something they're interested in.
I wonder if there's anywhere in the US this isn't fairly common. I can see how someone might not be aware of it, depending on how they grew up, but I can't imagine there are many places it's rare.
[EDIT] Incidentally, in addition to the tax-evasion and benefits-qualification purposes mentioned elsewhere, this tactic is also used to evade child support.
> so long as politicians are telling people that we can't afford the welfare state some people are going to be resentful that any immigrant gets a single penny.
But if you're an immigrant, and especially an undocumented one, you're not entitled to welfare, are you?
which holds true in one case that the "left" lost the fight over immigration when the phrase "illegal immigrant" became widespread.
The presence of illegal immigrants in our economy has numerous hidden effects: hire a Mexican as a farm hand and you'll get a talented agricultural professional who will save some money so he can start up his own farm back home. You can try to hire an American but you'll have to pay a lot more money than Burger King because Burger King is an easier job -- almost any US citizen will have little experience or aptitude for the work and will see it as a dead end job.
Similarly, illegal immigrants greatly help the economics of the hospitality, landscaping, and many other industries in California.
The first thing voters hear when they here about this is "illegal" and a little pulse of energy travels in their brain to "illegal = bad" and their attitudes are already set.
In principle some normalization of immigration law to take "illegal" out of it would dramatically change the way people think about it. Once you got that electrical short circuit between "illegal" and "bad" out of the way we could have a totally different conversation. It wouldn't be the end of the Republican Party but it would cause a crisis for them and force them to develop new ideology in many areas.
Much like the "right", he "left" (the corporate-linked wings that hold power in Washington) doesn't want to bring up the subject of any serious reform of immigration in the US because it opens up this big can of worms because many people are winners or losers or believe they are winners or losers from this situation and since it is all illegal and "undocumented" we've got no data about what the real impacts are.
You work for someone and they pay you in cash. No banks or the IRS are notified. So you don't pay any taxes, but you also can't easily spend your money.
I know throughout much of Europe it also happens to pay some construction workers in cash. This removes the tax man, the construction worker makes more money, and the boss doesn't have to deal with as many regulations.
I've heard of this being prevalent in NYC in particular. I remember reading a story, and it was corroborated by some folks I knew at the time, in particular about car repair shops and adjacent activities (like pick n pull style places, part resellers etc). The police, in large, know that a lot of these places use gray area sources for getting parts and sometimes labor, but they're not really itching to do much about it on that level, because it provides this type of employment across the board in the burroughs where its most prevalent.
I have no idea how true this is today, but in circa 2015 or so, seemed to very much be the norm.
Off the books is getting harder and harder. I live in an area of the UK with basically no uber coverage (just to avoid confounding factors) and every taxi driver wants me to pay cash even though I never carry any - simply because taxi drivers have always had a small or large undeclared income.
The corollary of this is that taxi drivers cannot raise their rates because that is regulated - and regulated at a level that was set when cash was common and so would be a level that baked in the tax fraud.
A strange catch-22 but one I suspect is growing. As more of the world is online payments or nfc payments the less wriggle room there is.
It makes me so sad to see how many people chime in, to sign on to this complete willingness to take some obvious exceptions & caveats & use them to decide there's no problem, that everything is fine. The effort gone through to wring out excuses for having no empathy, for ignoring the truth is revilesome.
I had a number of friends who sometime after highschool or college moved to NYC area & lived in ridiculously illegal cramped over-stuffed loud living spaces & struggled to eat, to be in the city. Struggling for jobs & work but feeling like they had to be in the city. These are mostly quite privileged folks who had good educations at good public schools, and still struggling to stay standing at all.
NYC is absurd to me, is shocking in extreme in it's cost of living, limited housing options, in how hard it can be to get by. There's a huge question in my mind of how many people fare & make it, transplants & many many natives raised there. The findings here completely lines up with my expectation & the unfortunately stark reality of life in such an amazing place. There may be some light grift, and some higher scale grift such as buying whole appartments, but by god, it hardly seems to change how hard it can be to find place, to gain income of sufficient scale for that grift to be of any real scale.
That just reminds me of a conversation last night. A friend's parents live in South East Asia and have a live in helper (common). He was describing the helper's bedroom as small and I was like "you just described a common apartment size in Japan".
Meaning, it was small because he's used to American sizes where the average residence size is 210 square meters where as in Japan is 93sqm add it's trivial to find apartments of 15sqm. No one blinks an eye because it's normal where as American often sees that and thinks it's some kind of exploitation.
Some of you might have lived in a space that small for a few years in dorm room in collage. You likely survived and weren't traumatized for being in that space.
This isn't to detract from the idea that many people in NYC might not be making enough money. Only that it's common to think people need more than they do ... And also that not being able to build smaller places means people end up having to pay for more than they could get by with.
Some people on HN are living in a bubble, with their level of empathy akin to those of pwASPD. Sometimes I get sick reading some comments to see how detached some folks are. This is one of them.
Discussing about the semantics of what "livable" means and whether the title is (in)correct while it doesn't change the grave reality of the situation at all. Unbelievable.
Respectfully, you're projecting far too much into my comment.
There are many human circumstances in NYC that are not acceptable, tenable, or sufferable. In fact, there are many that are exploitative, coercive, and frankly disturbing.
The reality is that there are 20+ million people living in the NYC metro area, a number that is increasing monotonically every year. Their experiences can't be reduced to a number like this, but if you try to do it, you should do it in a way that doesn't insult or mislead.
Part of being a New Yorker is "finding a way", and many of those ways fall outside the purview of studies like this one. This fact is our collective loss. All I'm saying is that there is a lot to be learned by studying the whole economy of the city and state, not only what's reported to the IRS and Census bureau.
If you look at my cousin comments in this tree, hopefully you can see some context here. I understand that calling for more data can come across as callousness, when the goal is helping the city's poor. I think you're missing the fact that the two are orthogonal: you can want more data and action now, which is the camp I'm in.
> "60% of new yorkers are not earning a living wage" is inaccurate
Sure, but "60% of New Yorkers break the law to make a living wage" isn't any less scathing. Either way, the situation looks pretty bleak. At this point, I can't see a future where NYC doesn't become the next Detroit.
I don't think you know much about how Detroit collapsed if you're saying that. While crime and public safety have become issues, I think most of the blame can be assigned to police too lazy to do their jobs.
A lot of NYC benefits- subsidized or free health insurance, subsidized housing, food stamps, free child care benefits, etc only kick in if your income is below a certain threshold. It’s very easy to work off the books in NYC and collect the benefits while still making a decent amount of money in cash.
> if you're poor and desperate, there are many ways to "live" that, while not particularly desirable to most people, are certainly available
They make the same mistake everyone does when running living-wage statistics nationwide and blindly applying that methodology to New York: “assum[ing] that a one adult family would rent a single occupancy unit (zero bedrooms) for an individual adult household” [1].
Nobody does this. You get roommates. It’s a luxury to have a studio to yourself in New York, and there’s nothing shameful in that.
Do you think that people will choose illegal out of whim? I saw in manhattan that people where struggling behind low paid jobs. Low pay in scandinavia is above that threshold and people can afford a (more than decent) living.
> but "60% of new yorkers are not earning a living wage" is inaccurate
If we define living way as proper healthcare, paid time off, paid sick leave, adequate income to put into savings/retirement.. enough money for education, childcare.... then do you think that number is inaccurate?
I sure don't. And this doesn't have much to do with new york. At least half of the US population lives under these conditions.. probably even more.
The term living wage means more than putting a roof over your head and having a job. It's being able to not feel basically like a slave.
The (uncomfortable for us) reality is, for many people living in NYC, the things you mention are not considered minimum standards for a happy or fulfilled life.
4.4 million people in NYC are immigrants, many of them coming from situations where the phrase "standard of living" carries no water. These people want their children or childrens' children to have the life you describe, and see that as fair.
I'm not saying it's a good thing or an acceptable thing, merely calling it what it is. I agree with you that the government should be funding a higher standard of living for all. But reality as it exists today is more complicated than the platonic ideals we'd like it to be.
My coworkers and I do not earn a living wage for our locale from our company. That’s easily tens of thousand of employees at one of the largest companies in the world. I doubt most locales earn living wages working there in our job and similar descriptions. But, some receive thousands in tips per year which go unrecorded. Plus the job easily provides side work with the same customer network which also provides thousands in unrecorded income.
All to save the parent company some money, this huge grey network is spawned.
Cash businesses and a lot of cheating on taxes/income reports.
I have some NYC-native friends whose parents make less than $20k a year on paper but own homes and generally live comfortably.
This is common in their immigrant community. On top of that, people rent apartments to each other cash only, pay with cash at restaurants or grocery store, etc.
I pay my taxes, not because I want to but because the state has right to licit first use of force and can throw me in jail if I don't. I personally have too much to lose so I comply. There's nothing moral about paying taxes because there is no consent involved. I'm not paying for things I'm using. I'm having money taken from me with no guarantee that I get something in return comensurate with how much is being taken from me with the threat of violence.
That being said, I'm not going to take exception with the people who are economically at the bottom and whose lives would be far worse if they didn't do what they can to avoid having their pockets picked by government. I wish my pockets weren't being picked but if someone else is able to avoid that fate, good for them.
It's far more moral for these people to keep the fruits of their own labor to make ends meet than for them to steal from other productive citizens trying to make a living, which is what we'd be forcing them to do if there was no way for them to avoid having their pockets picked by the government.
There is consent to taxation -- your parents consented for you on your behalf when they had guardianship over you as a child, by choosing to have your citizenship here. You implicitly maintained that by retaining your citizenship at the age of majority.
We probably agree in many ways on how badly tax money is spent, but that there is "nothing moral" about it is a statement that does not make sense.
It does to me. These are likely people that are living in lower quality housing with more people packed in per square foot of housing out of necessity. I don't have actually data to back up this assertion, but this has been my personal observation of folks that do the kind of informal work that allows them to be paid under the table.
There's some truth. My friend's parents don't live in desirable areas (to white collar workers) and in older housing. It is not rundown or anything, but it is an insular immigrant community. There's a reason almost none of their first generation kids stay in that area.
But they live comfortably — at least the people I talk to go on vacation often, were able to help my friend with student loans, have cars in NYC, etc.
I'm sure the GP would be happy if his tax dollars went to building roads and bridges, and not the thousand other things that are of dubious worth to the nation as a whole.
And I'm sure someone else would be happy if their tax dollars went to those things you dub of dubious worth. Picking and choosing where your tax dollars are spent is impractical.
I don't mind subsidizing it because I'm taking on significantly less risk by paying taxes, and these people aren't doing it out of some villainous intent, they're having a hard time getting by to the point that it's a worthwhile risk.
On the other end of the spectrum we have billionaires paying accountants and lawyers to exploit every tax loophole they can find. They don't even need to do it, they could easily just pay their taxes owed, but they choose not to.
> Must be fun to pay your taxes knowing that you are subsidising this BS.
I wouldn't be angry at working middle- or upper-middle-class people cheating the taxman in order to actually enjoy a decent living. I'd be angry at the politicians, large companies and ultra-high-net-worth individuals that are able to legally but unjustly cheat the taxman (and ultimately the taxpayer) or otherwise unjustly enrich themselves or their friends via lobbying, under-the-table money or favours thanks to having the right connections.
While true, it can still cause resentment if $subpopulation appears to be able to get away with "cheating" — scare quotes because it's not well-defined, and the resentment still happens even when the "cheating" is necessary to maintain existence rather than comfort, e.g. "Why do disabled single mothers get paid to look after their kids?" and "Why do we pay to house these people who fled a war and don't know if their families are still alive?" etc.
I don't have any solution here. Lots of resentful people claim to follow a specific dude that told rich people to pay their taxes, to give all their money to the poor, etc., and if a lifetime of religious practices don't persuade them what on earth can a random internet stranger like me do?
Some taxes are the price of civilization. I don't know how anyone can look at our current taxation scheme and how it is spent and make the argument that what we're subject to in the US is civilized. Just look at how much of taxes go to government largesse in Washington DC and bombing people that don't look like us abroad.
It's 2023. We have the technology to run more and more parts of the government in a way that we pay directly for the things we use so that each need currently met by government is forced to be more efficient if people saw how much they are paying for that. Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome. If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.
> If all government services moved to a fee based approach
This is essentially just privatizing everything. Just have all the kids pay for their own schooling. Eliminate Medicaid, kids can afford their own healthcare. All social safety nets would be eliminated, as if they require the people receiving the benefits to fund it then those programs would just never actually work.
> Locally, I pay a separate fee for trash pickup. That's awesome.
Its not awesome when your neighbor decides to just no longer pay for trash service and starts piling up trash heaps right along your property line leading to extremely unsanitary conditions right next to your home. Or when your neighbors don't bother paying their fire department fees and that trash heap right next to your house starts burning but the department won't bother doing anything until its your house on fire.
I see this working by being forced to pay some $X (your taxes) but you can distribute that however you see fit. Another option could be packages such as "childless" where fewer of your taxes (but still some base amount) go to schools or "carless" where the bulk of your taxes go to local roads and mass transit rather than highways. I'd love to see this attempted on the municipal level. Especially in a city like my own, Toronto, where council loves to give yet more money to the police even though people are screaming for bike lanes or a home they can afford.
>If all government services moved to a fee based approach, you could literally pick and choose what parts of being civilized you want and what parts you don't want.
And screw the poors while we are at it! Added bonus!
Ideally all children would get a good education, but I find it morally repugnant that unrelated person Y gets tossed in a cage if they don't fund person X's children.
your childhood was funded. or did your parents build the roads to the place where you were born? like it or not, a continuous society is a ponzi scheme of sorts. one which you benefitted from.
The funding of my childhood can be traced back capital investments and production in an old farming family, amongst other places.
The initial roads layout were likely put there by slaves. The capital growth needed to propel the family into generational wealth to fund our childhoods likely was fueled by slaves. We need to perpetuate slavery because muh roads were made possible by slaves and I benefitted.
Fortunately we can put the descendants of those slaves to work yet -- we'll call it 'property tax' and they still to this day work the fields, even if they're childless, to subsidize education of my farming family. If they don't pay it the sheriff just boots them out onto the street!
It's not slavery. It just happens to be that these descendents in rural America often have to work agricultural jobs to pay their property tax (a tax that in turn pays for my extended farming family's kids' educations). And if they don't pay those taxes they get booted onto the street. And if they get booted on the street they eventually get tossed in a cage (instantaneously if they resist the booting). And when they get tossed in a cage, the 13th amendment against slavery no longer applies them. You see, you can't make them slaves (again) unless they don't do their forced field work!
Fortunately at least we seem to have understood the fact I benefitted and got roads from it, doesn't mean it needs to be perpetuated.
Hopefully some of it will be caught by the IRS now that they're finally at least close to being adequately funded -- assuming the "conservatives" don't succeed in their fight against reduced deficits and tough-on-crime policies.
Hate it break it to you, but the funding for the IRS consistently fell through Obama's entire tenure and was at least 20% lower when he left office than when he started, including the years that dems controlled both house and senate. Conservatives suck but don't buy into the narrative that they're the only shitty people.
Obama is pretty dang conservative, but setting that aside, the funding for the IRS is set by Congress. I've seen no sign that the democrats reduced the IRS budget while they held power, but I'll admit I may have overlooked it.
In any case, today, there's only one party opposed to the recent funding increase, and it's the party that proudly claims to be the most anti-crime and anti-deficit folks in congress. Those are the facts today. This absolutely makes them the shittier people.
it exist everywhere, but larger cities have this problem largely because their taxation and regulation is exploitive forcing people out of the legal economy as a matter of self preservation.
Not sure about it being a dream! They've constructed for themselves quite a nice life, but because it's technically in the shadows, there's a lingering paranoia that it can all be taken away.
Re amounts: it's actually documented by the IRS to be $10,000 [1]. The bank is required to report cash deposits and transfers of $10k within a 24 hour period.
> How do you know that? Your next statement is that there's no good way to measure that income, how do you know how large that economy is?
Because by the books, 60% of the residents of the most populous and most expensive metro in the US are living there while earning on paper less than a living wage, yet somehow still manage to do so. Either one or more of the following must be true:
1. There is a large off-the-books economy.
2. The study in the article incorrectly determines what a "living wage" is.
3. The vast majority of the people living in New York City are in absolutely dire circumstances but somehow won't leave to literally any other city in the US where they would immediately earn more relative to the cost of living.
I think /both/ #1 and #2 are correct, and that #3 might be correct for some people, but most people in New York City /like/ living there, they feel connected to the city, and ingrained in its culture, which includes a very large amount of #1.
3. The vast majority of the people living in New York City are in absolutely dire circumstances but somehow won't leave to literally any other city in the US where they would immediately earn more relative to the cost of living.
To this last point, moving has costs. At minimum transport costs (fuel, bus ticket, whatever). If they have some furniture worth taking, they need a U-Haul.
People might not have the small amount of cash/credit required to move across the country. Staying in poverty in NYC might be their only option.
Not just that, but in a world where (particularly for poor and immigrant communities) employment is frequently informal and based on social and family networks ("The restaurant my cousin works at is hiring" or "My brother's construction gig needs some extra hands on Friday"), moving to another city means giving up a huge portion of your social capital and possibly all of your earning potential, as well as your (similarly informal) safety net.
While you're correct, and I do account for this in my statement, most studies on the topic found that people refuse to move not due to financial reasons but due to social support systems, primarily family or cultural connections. Something that's not entirely unique, but relatively uncommon in the US, is large cultural and ethnic enclaves in cities, New York City happens to be home to largest number of these, and therefore many people grow up in New York City ingrained into a culture that ties into their ethnicity, and the city itself, in a way which they would not find anywhere else in the US if they moved. Leaving this and family behind to leave the city is considered untenable by many people, especially in cultures that emphasize family connections and multi-generational households as the norm.
These emotional draws are much more meaningful and significant causes for why people don't move than whether or not they can afford the U-Haul one time.
Anyone who has lived in the (NYC metro) region can almost certainly provide you more anecdotes. Filtering by circumstances I can personally attest to in NYC proper:
- 3 situations where nannies were being paid entirely under the table (this one is less common now that everyone I know is over 26 and needs health insurance)
- a small (legitimate) business owner who regularly employs a handyman under the table
- restaurant staff who don't report cash tips (too common to count)
- Street vendors all over the place (including those who were openly selling cannabis prior to legalization)
- Tour guides working entirely for cash
- Lots of technically-illegal off-the-books living situations (a living wage goes a lot further when you're willing to live in a basement studio apartment with no windows).
- Small stores with a "regulars" discount that never hits the register
Probably, but some phenomena can exist that don't get tracked well. At some point, a plurality of primary testimony that N is pervasive needs to be enough to break through the paradox of the heap.
It is probably a rounding error for white collar and technology workers (the crowd here.) However, I'd doubt this is a rounding error for other trades (construction, electrical, plumbing, etc) -- so many repairmen demand cash or demand premiums if paying via Zelle/etc.
This isn't a kind or charitable way to respond. The GP isn't making any sort of moralizing claim about "cheating" or the city's underclasses being "way richer" than measured.
Went straight from "if you're poor and desperate [..] there are many ways to "live" that, while not particularly desirable to most people, are certainly available" to "I have a friend "whose family know how to work off the books and avoid the IRS [..] bought a building in Brooklyn for a low million dollar figure [..]. But their household was probably below the "living" wage, from the point of view of this data set, for the past 25 years."
That's a sleight of hand. "But look, I know some poor people who cheat !".
Yeah, a minority cheats. Now if someone can come up and say there are way less poor people than we think in NY and back it up it'd be another story.
Not necessarily poor people, but something like half of the world's workforce is "informal." Not formally recorded. The on-the-books view is way different than the total view.
But how much of that is low-wage workers? And how much is wealthy individuals trading in crypto, or hiring expensive lawyers/accountants to move their money around?
Your own article addresses this: NYC (correctly!) counts students as homeless even if they're living long-term with other families or in family shelters, of which the city has many.
"100,000 homeless children" does not mean "100,000 street urchins." It means that many of the people who make up NYC's informal economy have living situations that the city (again, correctly) classifies as unstable, or who are dependent on the city for stable housing.
The eye-popping numbers of "homeless" in NYC are not comparable to the situation in California.
Many of the "homeless" in NYC are immigrant families in shelters. As NYC is a portal for immigrants coming to the US and some of them end up in difficulty, this is how it is.
This is different from the situation in California where the "homeless" really are sleeping outside.
Precisely. There are very few things that I give the city credit for with respect to how it treats its homeless and unhoused populations, but categorization is one of them: the city doesn't attempt to sweep the problem under the rug by pretending that shelters (including family shelters) are long-term housing solutions that offer stable lives for their residents.
> As an example, I have a friend who grew up in a working class family in south Brooklyn. His mother's job was "on the books" and his father's construction work was completely off-the-books, paid in cash. Everybody in the family was very aware of the amount of money you could deposit in a bank account, in a given time period, without attracting IRS attention.
> The existence of this grey economy makes it very difficult to measure income and expenses for a large proportion of New Yorkers.
Disgusting that your first thought is about how difficult it is to measure income and not the fact that working class people (your words) would lose a third of their income or more, if their work was in the formal economy.
It's even worse if you look at it the other way: working class people's wages would be 50% more, rather than 33% less.
Working class people (literally anyone who must work to have a modest lifestyle) should not be paying a larger percent of their wages than those who do not have to work.
Their comment is illuminating the current way things work, that's hardly disgusting. That status quo you may not like, but that's saying nothing about the author of the comment, or their views on that fact.
Your anger should be at the system, not the author pointing out a fact.
The people with income levels in question don't have a marginal tax rate anywhere close to 33%. More like 11% for federal and 6% for NYS before any credits.
A lot of the comments exhibit a common misunderstanding of the poor in America. Many (most?) "poor" people work full-time jobs, but the pay from those jobs is simply inadequate to cover basic living expenses without drawing on external resources. That's what people mean when they say these jobs don't pay a "living wage."
How do those people live, then? Subsidies from elsewhere. As noted elsewhere, this can be in the form of living with family, cash payments from family, transfer payments from government, illegal side hustles, etc.
A concrete example: when people say that Walmart is subsidized by taxpayers, what they mean is that Walmart can employ hundreds of thousands at below-subsistence wages only because the taxpayers will provide for their employees so that they can afford basic necessities. In the parlance, they do not provide a living wage, but their employees are still able to live due to government largesse. (I'm picking on Walmart because they are typically the employer of the largest cohort of government transfer payments in a state.)
>A concrete example: when people say that Walmart is subsidized by taxpayers, what they mean is that Walmart can employ hundreds of thousands at below-subsistence wages only because the taxpayers will provide for their employees so that they can afford basic necessities.
This is a completely ridiculous assertion because if Walmart didn't employ these people, then taxpayers then they would be required to be subsidized by the taxpayer even more. Focusing on wages is missing the point. The problem isn't that people aren't being paid enough because America has the richest residents in the world, excluding tax-haven countries. The problem that housing and healthcare costs are too high, both of which are controlled by policymakers that refuse to understand how incentives work. Even if you could magically squeeze higher wages from Walmart profits without destroying the economy, most of these wages would go towards these government-protected rent seekers. See housing in the Bay Area as the most obvious example of this.
It's also odd to single out Walmart, just because they happen to occupy a space that employs a lot of lower-income workers. 100% of Jane Street makes well above a living wage. That doesn't make Jane Street a more virtuous company than Walmart or any less responsible for people's welfare.
Walmart earns $13k of profit across each of their 2m employees. One could make the argument that if Walmart had to pay each employee an extra (say) $3k annually [1], management would instead choose to shut the whole thing down and return capital to the shareholders, which would be a choice available to them. But I don't find that argument compelling in the slightest, and Walmart does not have any compelling IP that would preclude letting management shut it down and have the likes of Target/Kroger fill the gap in the market.
1 - an additional $3k annually would be transformative to the life of the average Walmart employee.
>Walmart earns $13k of profit across each of their 2m employees.
Your numbers are off. Walmart's pretax income was ~$19B, so that's ~$8k profit per employee.
>One could make the argument that if Walmart had to pay each employee an extra (say) $3k annually
If they were pressured to increase wages, they would adjust their business model to employ fewer, "more productive" employees (e.g. invest more in automation). The government would still have to subsidize the cost of living of those who would have otherwise been unemployed.
Anything helps when you are in that situation. An additional $3k can pay for the family dog for a full year including vet visits. Or upgrade their child's school supplies. Or get new tires or work boots.
> Walmart earns $13k of profit across each of their 2m employees. One could make the argument that if Walmart had to pay each employee an extra (say) $3k annually [1], management would instead choose to shut the whole thing down and return capital to the shareholders, which would be a choice available to them.
Honest question: why not make it $5k or $10k?
Is there something magic about $3k that leaves Walmart employees unaffected, and — if so — why will $5k not achieve this?
> This is a completely ridiculous assertion because if Walmart didn't employ these people, then taxpayers then they would be required to be subsidized by the taxpayer even more.
That's a massive false dichotomy. There are options are vastly more options beyond "Walmart employs these people" and "Walmart doesn't employe these people". For example, Walmart could just... pay them more.
> Even if you could magically squeeze higher wages from Walmart profits without destroying the economy, most of these wages would go towards these government-protected rent seekers.
Walmart pays out billions in dividends every year and makes billions in profit. Asking that their business actually be sustainable and not rely on employee exploitation shouldn't be some bold proposal and if Walmart is incapable of existing without relying on its employees being on government assistance, then maybe Walmart shouldn't exist at all.
> The problem isn't that people aren't being paid enough
> The problem that housing and healthcare costs are too high
Why can't these both be problems? Low skill labor could be exploited to pad corporate bottom lines and housing and healthcare costs could be unreasonably high due to governmental policy. These two things can both be true.
I don't think I could disagree more with the parent's argument.
Essentially it's that if Walmart didn't employ they poor, they'd become a burden on the state. Which is the same argument used to defend the exploitation of workers in banana republics.
They go on to say that the government is the cause of high rents, by pointing to San Francisco which has the highest rent in the nation. An argument which is trivially dismantled when we look at rural areas like the ones in my state where housing costs are increasing so quickly that people are having to move away. Which is due to real estate speculation:
When we fit a curve to the data, we see that we're in the middle of a class war between the owner class and the worker class. Owners want to own even more so that they can quit working and have workers support them. Workers are so beat down and disenfranchised by 40 years of trickle-down economics that they're too divided to organize or even vote for candidates that would actually fix the problem. So they vote in fear to keep things the way they are. It's so tragic to think about that most people don't.
Until we examine these root fallacies from first principles, we're stuck. Just how the owner class likes it.
> Which is the same argument used to defend the exploitation of workers in banana republics.
This is a completely bad-faith interpretation of my comment. The OP and I were both talking about the cost of government services. If you want to frame that as a burden, that's on you. Banana republics didn't provide their citizens with trillions of dollars of government services.
> An argument which is trivially dismantled when we look at rural areas like the ones in my state where housing costs are increasing so quickly that people are having to move away
I guessed what state you lived in before I looked at your profile. Check where all the recent immigrants are coming from. NIMBYism in California is so bad that its effects spilled over to the entire west coast.
Fair enough, things get lost in translation on the web sometimes.
I'm concerned though that so often the government is blamed for problems started by the private sector. I might go so far to say that regulatory capture is the issue. Maybe unintended consequences are at play.
But in my state, a certain potato and beef producing corporation irreparably damaged the high desert through unregulated grazing. Old growth forests were clearcut a century ago. Rivers and lakes are polluted with chemicals and heavy metals from mine tailings. We needed regulation constantly, but never got it until it was too late.
So what feels counterculture in California, stuff like conservatism and the demand for smaller government, has had devastating consequences for red states like mine. I'm the minority here. I've been disenfranchised my entire life. We rely on you all to vote for the environmental protections that we have been gerrymandered out of voting for ourselves due to decades of entrenched one-party control.
Also after sleeping on it, I realized that my "root fallacies" comment was a bit heavy-handed. I have my own blind spots from being radicalized by the constant division sewn by amoral politicians who got their playbook from guys like Newt Gingrich. But I've known that provincial glorification of half-truths wielded for political gain my entire life. What I was trying to say there is that we need a common context based in truth or we'll never be able to communicate civilly and settle our disputes. Which I believe is what you were getting at with your comment here.
> if Walmart didn't employ these people, then taxpayers then they would be required to be subsidized by the taxpayer even more
Or Walmart could pay them a living wage directly, and just lower it's profits a little. That's how it works in every other developed country on the planet. Even Australia with it's $21.38 minimum wage and healthcare for all has only 3.5% unemployment [1]
>Even Australia with it's $21.38 minimum wage and healthcare for all has only 3.5% unemployment [1]
I agree that the US can increase its minimum wage without significantly increasing unemployment, but it can't do so nearly as much as Australia. For one, Australia has a lower minimum wage for youth. More importantly, Australia has vast mineral resources that are in high demand, so that creates a higher demand for lower-income labor.
Walmart gross profit for the quarter ending October 31, 2022 was $37.200B, a 4.78% increase year-over-year.
Walmart gross profit for the twelve months ending October 31, 2022 was $146.292B, a 2.14% increase year-over-year.
Walmart annual gross profit for 2022 was $143.754B, a 3.54% increase from 2021.
Walmart annual gross profit for 2021 was $138.836B, a 7.33% increase from 2020.
Walmart annual gross profit for 2020 was $129.359B, a 0.2% increase from 2019.
Net income[1] would be much more relevant measure of profit, as it describes the bottom line that can be returned to investors, or be payed to employees before the company becomes unprofitable.
Net income is about 9 Billion [2]. If the company were nationalized and turned into a worker cooperative, it could increase the pay for each of 2.3 million workers about 3.9k/year before it starts going out of business.
> Net income[1] would be much more relevant measure of profit, as it describes the bottom line that can be returned to investors, or be payed to employees before the company becomes unprofitable
Ah, no, because Net Income is showing how much money is left after the Walton's pay themselves billions of dollars.
The company is making more than $100 billion in profit every year, and increasing every year.
there are going to be headlines like "Walmart is subsidized". The EITC is one reason why the minimum wage wasn't raised for so long in the US.
The idea is that there are some workers (say teenagers working at the supermarket) who don't have to earn a "living wage" to support a family (if they did get a living wage then prices would go up and the living wage would be more and the cycle would repeat...) so rather than setting wages for them to be high enough to support a family we don't have, the government subsidizes people who are raising families on low incomes directly.
The theory is clear, but after a few decades the results are also clear.
> say teenagers working at the supermarket
This flawed assumption is where the theory went wrong, IMHO. The EITC is designed around (say) 5 years of a young worker's life, but our labor market requires people in those roles through 5 decades of their lives. Low-wage employers have grown dependent on people of all ages to work for "teenager" wages through to retirement.
> The EITC
It's not just the EITC. Full-time low-wage employees don't really have any money, so they are subsidized by an array of federal and state programs. EBT/food stamps, Section 8/rental assistance, etc. Low-wage employees receive a lot of direct payments from taxpayers. (This is good!)
In any case, it's worth discussing whether it is appropriate for companies like Walmart (profit per employee: $13k) to be allowed to pay their staff at such a rate that the taxpayer then has to pick up the tab for their employee's food stamps.
Either case -- yes, it is totally accurate to say that employers are being subsidized by
This is an argument to not have any of those benefits (nor the income tax as well). Then a stronger semblance of markets can take root, especially w.r.t pay.
I'd be open to a UBI-type subsidy that is NOT means tested (everyone get it) to replace all the programs you've mentioned above, which are means tested.
> This is an argument to not have any of those benefits (nor the income tax as well). Then a stronger semblance of markets can take root, especially w.r.t pay.
This is an important argument! The counterargument is that we Americans tried it that way, and to summarize: it did not work out very well. By which I mean the outcome was broadly considered, across decades, not congruent with American values and preferences, which tilted toward electing representation to correct the situation. Which is not to say this wouldn't work elsewhere, just that America is not "elsewhere."
> I'd be open to a UBI-type subsidy that is NOT means tested (everyone get it) to replace all the programs you've mentioned above, which are means tested.
This would be an interesting experiment and IMHO is more intriguing that rehashing experiences that have already been repeatedly rebuffed by Americans.
> The counterargument is that we Americans tried it that way, and to summarize: it did not work out very well
Actually no, it did work really well. The first century in the US saw leaps and bounds of economic growth, and for the common person most of all.
Of course, generally things are better off today, after having benefited from all that early growth. Still, the pace of advancement has slowed, and most of that slowdown has come from people thinking they can redesign society.
If their salaries went up 10% then they would save some of that money. Prices would rise 3%. And then when their salaries went up 3% the prices would go up 1%. And then their salaries would go up 1$ forcing the prices to go up 0.3% and then you'd reach a limit....
Well that's what I think. Do you have any proof backing up your statement that I'm wrong and "the cycle would repeat" or are you just repeating talking points from someone else?
What I'll say though is that there is a real lack of thinking about "second order effects" of policy from people that are quick to subsidize things.
It is interesting right now to see Britain stuck in a place where it seems to have gotten stuck several times since 1900 in which (1) the economy is screwed up, (2) prices are rising, (3) workers in critical industries are on strike, (4) the effects approximate a general strike, (5) strikes screw up the economy more... And politicians are screaming "can't you just take one for the society as a whole" and "if we give you a raise this year prices will go up and you'll ask for a raise next year..."
In Britain it is worse than the US because they are so dependent on trade and have a non-dominant currency. It is not unusual at all for them to have violent swings in prices of fuel, food, and other imports, and when you consider the "wage-price" spiral inside the country you also have to consider the effect of Britons having more nominal money in their pocket to spend on imports, how that effects exchange rates, etc.
> if they did get a living wage then prices would go up and the living wage would be more and the cycle would repeat...
that's not how the world works
if they were paying them a "living wage" then they wouldn't hire low-skilled teenagers at all; if you raise the price of salmon roe to the same by weight as caviar, few people will buy salmon roe instead of caviar
and this is exactly what happens irl: "minimum" wage laws increase teenage unemployment, preventing them from getting experience, which no one (other than economists) factors into "wages"
"minimum" wage laws drive salaries down from low to zero (i.e. unemployment) for low-skilled workers, preventing them from getting more skilled
Walmart employer 1.7m people in the US and has a revenue of $437b in the US.
If those 1.7m employees were all on $10 an hour for 2000 hours a year, that's 34b.
If you doubled that wage to $20 an hour that would result in an extra $34b in costs at most. Revenue would have to go from $437b to $471b, a 7.8% increase.
This "living wage leads to inflation" story is right wing fearmongering. Prices don't just magically rise. They rise either because demand exceeds supply, or because monopolists realize they can capture from consumers. There aren't really shortages of the type of food/goods people at the bottom of the economic totem pole (who will benefit from a living wage) purchase. If prices rise due to a living wage, outside of a few corner cases it'll be the result of big business profiteering, which is the real problem that needs to be addressed.
> This "living wage leads to inflation" story is right wing fearmongering.
No, it's a misunderstanding of supply and demand. When you raise the price of something, doesn't matter if it's labor or oranges, demand goes down. "Minimum" wage laws result in unemployment for lower-skilled workers, preventing them from getting valuable experience. Everyone who works decides what their minimum is; but somehow "minimum" wage proponents don't trust low-wage earner to decide for themselves so they prefer them to be unemployed instead because they don't understand that this is the result of those policies.
I would be totally happy to put an exception in the minimum wage law for apprenticeships and training periods for challenging jobs. Just as long as McDonalds isn't run by "apprentice" fry cooks and register jockeys.
Low wage jobs with no career prospects are just preying on people for whom the alternative is homelessness.
If there are very few non-predatory low wage jobs with good career prospects (which is one of the fundamental gripes of millennials/gen z along with housing costs) then your choices are:
1. Get lucky enough to land a good low paying job where advancement is likely
2. Take the shit job while you hope to find #1 (assuming you have the time and energy to keep job hunting while dealing with life/taking care of a kid/going to school part time/etc)
3. Get evicted for not paying rent and become homeless. You aren't even allowed the option of homesteading/living off the land, because it's all private property and some rich jerk who never uses it will eventually end up calling the sheriff on you.
4. Say fuck the system and become a criminal.
People are tired of spending their entire life on option #2, burning half their monthly paycheck on substandard, overcrowded living accommodations. These jobs are a trap, and companies that have roles of this sort should be forced to either build progression into them, or compensate workers better. If a business can't turn a profit without exploiting its workers it shouldn't be a business.
> Many (most?) "poor" people work full-time jobs, but the pay from those jobs is simply inadequate to cover basic living expenses without drawing on external resources.
You hear this a lot, but I haven't seen any data that support it. According to census data, among "householders" (presumable the head of a given household) in the bottom quintile, 68% do not work, 13% work part time, and only 18% work full time. 62% of households in the bottom quintile have zero workers in the home.[0] In both the bottom and second-lowest quintile, the mean number of earners per household is less than 1!
I don't have recent figures handy, but I think 18% qualifies as "many" when you are talking about potentially tens of millions of affected individuals (including dependents).
The argument against living wage isn't bootstrapping a strategic industry or national defense, it's so that e.g. Walmart can earn $13k in profit per employee instead of (say) $10k profit per employee. It's definitely a legitimate public policy discussion as to whether subsidizing businesses like these is an appropriate use of taxpayer funds.
"Many", sure. I was just clarifying that it's far "most".
Walmart--like every other employer--pays the minimum required to attract workers. The welfare state exists, so of course Walmart and workers take this into account when determining an agreeable wage--why wouldn't they? This isn't nefarious behavior on Walmart's part--it's an unintended (if unsurprising) consequence of the welfare state.
Blaming the market for responding to state intervention seems silly.
Agree this is smart management by Walmart. But it makes sense for taxpayers to ask whether the operant regulations & safety net should be changed such that Walmart had to shoulder a larger portion of the burden for keeping their workers employed.
> But it makes sense for taxpayers to ask whether the operant regulations & safety net should be changed such that Walmart had to shoulder a larger portion of the burden for keeping their workers employed.
I think we're on the same page for the most part. My hesitation stems from this common framing of the problem as one that--at least rhetorically--originates with Walmart. To me, this framing seems to have less to do with the actual problem, its cause and potential solutions, than with political convenience. That wouldn't be a concern if the folks writing the bills drew a line between rhetoric and policy, but I'm not sure that's a reasonable expectation these days.
It seems to me that the origin of the problem is with the nature of the welfare state, and that solving the problem at its root will require changes to the welfare state and the incentives that it creates. I'm not saying we should blow it up the welfare state, but if we can't even admit that our problems are of our own making, we've got zero chance of solving them.
Not everyone works for Walmart. Last I checked around half of employees work for “small businesses”. Which probably have various and different profit margins.
> In the parlance, they do not provide a living wage, but their employees are still able to live due to government largesse.
I really, really, really hate this framing. The whole point of these programs was to help people regardless of their employment status. The alternative is saying that only people without jobs should ever use a social service.
No one in their right mind would say that a single-payer health plan would "subsidize corporations" by making employees cheaper. So it seems wrong to accuse SNAP or Title IX of doing the same.
I think the only caveat is there is much debate about where to set the minimum wage, and it's not crystal clear what is the appropriate number. So for that debate I do think it is reasonable to use as a proxy "is the employee paid enough to not qualify for means-tested social assistance programs," because there is obviously a relationship in practice between the minimum wage and the amount ultimately spent on social assistance. This is only really true because the means-tested programs phase out as income increases, which would not be true of single-payer healthcare (so the argument doesn't make sense in that case).
I don't have a strong opinion on minimum wage, but it's pretty clear you can have equally good outcomes with multiple different approaches. There are some very progressive countries with no effective minimum wage (Finland being a notable example).
So to provide an analysis that is mathematically only going to favor one approach seems a bit jaded to me.
-> How do those people live, then? Subsidies from elsewhere. As noted elsewhere, this can be in the form of living with family, cash payments from family, transfer payments from government, illegal side hustles, etc.
Defer payments/maintenance to other areas of life. If they own a home maybe they decide to defer maintenance. If they can save a few bucks, maybe they avoid the Dr even though they're sick. They drive a less reliable car. Their food is lowest tier. Clothes are from thrift. Repairs are DIY, or help from a friend/family member.
This also evidences a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be a full-time low-wage employee.
> If they own a home
What home? We're talking about a cohort of people who work full-time jobs and still qualify for food stamps. Unless they inherited, they do not as a rule own homes.
> They drive a less reliable car.
Or cars.
But yes, they skimp on everything, and then the taxpayer kicks in for their food, (frequently) shelter, healthcare, etc.
I highly recommend Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado for a first-hand look into being working poor in America.
> What home? We're talking about a cohort of people who work full-time jobs and still qualify for food stamps. Unless they inherited, they do not as a rule own homes.
From the Article living wage in Onondaga County is $70,200.
The Fed has MHI in that county at $65,000, which I know is enough to afford a home in Onondaga County. As a rule, the median owns a home.
> But yes, they skimp on everything, and then the taxpayer kicks in for their food, (frequently) shelter, healthcare, etc.
Social spending isn't going to the median family.
> I highly recommend Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado for a first-hand look into being working poor in America.
I don't need to read a book about it. I lived it. My friends and family still live it. Your comment is very condescending, typical of the coastal liberal.
The median isn't the working poor. We're talking about two different groups of people.
> Your comment is very condescending, typical of the coastal liberal.
I offered a book I found informative to a stranger as something positive. I'm not a coastal liberal, but I do find your response unwarranted. I do genuinely hope the rest of your day goes better.
Not alone. My experience is that most of “those people” live with spouses, families, and roommates.
This isn’t necessarily preferable, but this is how most people survive. When I lived in Manhattan, it was super common for a married couple to split a studio. And most people I knew in their 20s would have 4-5 people splitting rent.
And everyone chose this. Some left the city (like me) and some grew their careers and eventually bought or rented their own space.
The good news is that people were mobile so no one was forced to live there.
> Many (most?) "poor" people work full-time jobs, but the pay from those jobs is simply inadequate to cover basic living expenses without drawing on external resources.
Most poor people are children under 18. I guess technically, you can work at 16, so some of them probably dropped out and work full-time, but it's definitely not the norm.
Most poor "adults" - are people >65 who aren't working full-time either.
Sure, most poor "18-65" year olds in the US work - but a large amount of these people that are "poor" are poor simply because they have kids (i.e. you're poor with the same wage if you have 2 kids but not if you have 0 kids) or because they work part-time... because they have kids.
Hi! I worked for a nonprofit poverty advocacy center in Chicago. This is totally wrong, but it's stated so confidently. Why do you say this? What's the source you got this opinion from? Do you even know?
This is an opportunity for you to learn more about yourself and grow! For some reason it helps your ego/reinforces your worldview to believe (and repeat!) that "most poor people are children under 18 or seniors" which is easily disprovable. So you should think about why you want to believe that, and what about your worldview would need to change if you accepted that that's not true (because it absolutely isn't!).
I should've added that college students make up a large chunk of poverty as well, and the disabled (non-working)...
Using conservative rates for child poverty, you get:
* ~32% of the entire poverty population is children <18
* ~18% are disabled and don't work
* ~16% is seniors
* ~10% is college students
* ~6.5% is single mothers
* ~6% don't work (either looking for work or not)
* ~10% is everyone else - including dual-parent HH, single father HH, disabled people that do work, etc...
The idea that most poor people (as defined by the definition of poverty in the US) are single people working full time jobs is not possible. The poverty line is BELOW a full-time minimum wage job, and it includes money received from government transfers like SNAP, etc...
Only ~29% of the poor work full-time jobs - because by definition it's quite difficult to work full-time and be "in poverty".
If your definition of poverty is something else - then sure - maybe most people in that "poverty" are full-time workers.
> Most poor people are children under 18. I guess technically, you can work at 16, so some of them probably dropped out and work full-time, but it's definitely not the norm.
> Most poor "adults" - are people >65 who aren't working full-time either.
The first bullet point in your quoted source:
> Of the 40.6 million Americans living in poverty in 2016, 56.1 percent were working-age adults, 18 to 64. Important shares of those living in poverty are children and adults aged 65 and older (32.6 percent and 11.2 percent respectively, in 2016).
I don't know why you included all these other bullets in your response. Are you just hoping that by adding extraneous information, that it would make it seem like your original statement was correct? Or that you were saying something different from what you actually said?
This ivory tower definition of a "Living Wage" must be wrong if 60% of the people living in NY don't hit the standard. If the city was populated by 60% people who do not earn enough to live, there would be chaos.
We should look at things from the other direction... what are people in the city actually earning? How are they living? What trade-offs did they make? Are they satisfied with their life? Which trade offs are they most unhappy about?
The term is capitalised because it has an actual defined meaning beyond the etymology derived from its component words. If you think everyone earning just enough to keep themselves physically alive is a sufficient standard to strive to for modern society, then I would question your ethics.
The "living" in the term Living Wage is about being able to actually live a life, not just survive it.
> We should look at things from the other direction...
There is nothing about the Living Wage that precludes doing that: it's a quantitative metric to be accompanied by your qualitative suggestions, not to supplant them.
> If you think everyone earning just enough to keep themselves physically alive is a sufficient standard to strive to for modern society, then I would question your ethics.
And what are your ethics? And why are you so sure you've got them right? If people are living so poorly in New York, they are free to leave, and yet they choose to stay there. There is no "human right" to live in New York. I certainly don't want to live there, and cost of living is only one of many reasons. Most importantly, it is certainly neither compassionate, nor wise, nor good, to subsidize people living there with other people's money, or, even worse, money we have to print from scratch or borrow from others, further driving inflation and national debt, which consequences affect the future and security of everyone.
Stop and consider that you may not be the compassionate hero you think you are. The great swindle of our times is to convince people to do very bad things in the name of empathy or compassion, all the while allowing them to feel good about themselves.
> it is certainly neither compassionate, nor wise, nor good, to subsidize people living there with other people's money
If you genuinely believe this to be true, then I think we can be sure my ethics are not aligned with yours.
Do you pay taxes? If you do, are you one of these folk that believes your contributions should only be spent on amenities for you to avail of, personally? God forbid any cent of what you "earn" should ever have any communal benefit for any of the other beings you share the planet with.
Your ethics are weak! The ethical thing to do is take tax dollars from NYC and judiciously use these scarce resources to help even poorer populations elsewhere.
Are you one of those people that think your tax dollars should only be spent where you are locally?
> Are you one of these folk that believes your contributions should only be spent on amenities for you to avail of, personally?
I don't think I've ever met anyone personally that believes this, or even have encountered this position online throughout my entire life. Is this a freshly constructed straw man, or do you have a link to someone with actual influence who legitimately holds this idea?
> God forbid any cent of what you "earn" should ever have any communal benefit for any of the other beings you share the planet with.
I pay 10% of my pre-tax income voluntarily to my church, which uses some of its donations to help others with food, clothing, shelter, job/career training, and education. Some of it gets used to provide assistance across the planet. I have no issue with spending my money or my time for the benefit of others. You people really need to learn some humility. You're not the virtuous saint you might think you are, and the people who disagree with you are not the selfish, callous monsters you might make them out to be.
It is interesting to note, for instance, that conservatives on average are far more likely to donate to charity than progressives, and far more likely to give service out of their own time: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/conservatives-are-more-...
There are many differences between private and public charity:
* One is done by compulsion and force of arms, the other voluntarily.
* One is subject to marketplace forces and competition, while the other holds an unbreakable monopoly (unless you count moving out of the country, I guess?).
* If a private organization does a bad job, it tends to die out. If a government organization does a bad job, it convinces us to double its budget and try harder.
* If a private organization runs out of money, it can't print more money or go into as much debt as it likes, putting a cap on the level of irresponsibility it can engage in.
* If a private organization fails, then the consequences are small. When governments fail under massive debt, inflation, price controls, and other poor decisions, everyone in the country suffers catastrophically.
* Government charity provides the opportunity for one group to vote to take away the money of another group. The relationship between votes and government handouts is so dangerous to a functioning society and yet gets entirely ignored.
There are so many pathologies to government wealth redistribution. On the whole, tremendous harm has been done and continues to be done through it. It's time to wake up and see that the other side not only doesn't have bad ethics, but, in fact, may hold a lot of wisdom that is so badly needed and sorely lacking in society today. Compassion is great, but compassionate foolishness ends up being about as disastrous as it sounds.
I think to OP's point though, it's hard to construct a "Living Wage" that does not include some imposition of white, Western morality. "This is the minimum ethical standard, as determined by middle-class researchers."
If you look at the methodology, they will often include things like owning your own car, a private living space, private food consumption, etc.
A pertinent example is if you are from a culture that doesn't cherish individuality so much, you may be perfectly happy to put up with a shared/used car, roommates, communal cooking, etc.
Which explains why we might consider wages "sub-living", but people still come from around the world and still thrive on them.
While I totally agree that imposition of white, Western morality is commonplace, applying it to the idea of economic autonomy is somewhat obscene - autonomy is universal, not culturally specific.
> as determined by middle-class researchers
This is a somewhat hilariously (and depressingly) circular critique given the economic barriers to entry in US education. How can the researchers be anything but middle-class if we can't even agree people should earn enough to go to / send their kids to college.
> often include things like owning your own car, a private living space, private food consumption, etc.
This tends to reflect local infrastructure and available amenities - which, yes, are likely governed by white Westerners, but that isn't a commentary on people needing a car for individual reasons. If the public transport is poor & my economic circumstances force me to do things I need a car to access (childcare, healthcare, work commutes), then private car ownership becomes less a cultural choice and more a local white-Western-imposed necessity.
> if you are from a culture that doesn't cherish individuality so much
This is the most ridiculous part - bringing up individuality here is so odd, when the whole resistance to mutual support provided by regulated living wages is about individualistic ideals of "everyone fending for themselves".
> people still come from around the world and still thrive on them
Citation needed. Sure, you will always find some individual who'll claim that they're "thriving", particularly if they were also subsisting in their country of origin (NY isn't the only place where people are struggling - out of the frying pan, etc.), but stating this is universally the case is obvious nonsense. Keeping in mind many such folk send income home, making their overall needs even greater.
??? My comment is not particularly downvoted. Are you trying to draw downvotes to it?
This is not something I am unfamiliar with. I did not grow up in America. I think you are putting too much of your reality on a set of numbers. Sure, housing is a lot cheaper in Romania! But it did not necessarily come with running water, or heat. Healthcare was free! If it existed for you. So you can do a heck of a lot more living in the US even without making a ton of money.
I don't know what you are going on about on mutual support. Mutual support means providing housing and meals and care for people you know. Using that as justification to pass economic laws seems exploitative
I think the owning your own car thing is pretty relevant here to your point - MIT's Living Wage calculator includes $7k in travel expenses for someone living in Manhattan. So in this particular case it's not reflective of local infrastructure. (It also seems unusually high - we own two cars and only budget $2500 a year for transportation).
I would actually encourage you to get to know some immigrants in your area. I think you will find they are doing better off than you think, even on wages lower than you would expect. Remittances are HUGE in most communities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittances_from_the_United_St...
I'm not saying that we shouldn't help people in need - I certainly have accepted my share of handouts. But I find the attempt to make a "living wage" that's a proxy for financial hardship in general is such a backwards approach to the problem.
Cynically, one might think the term “Living Wage” was selected to intentionally be confusing and result in drastic-sounding headlines like the above. Certainly they could have picked a much more descriptive name, but I suppose it wouldn’t have the emotional impact that this one apparently does.
Why be cynical and jump to negative conclusions when you can look it up? “Living Wage” was designed to be a term that helps people understand that the legal “minimum wage” is not enough for people to reasonably live on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage
Given the goal, the name seems pretty descriptive, so what term would be much more descriptive?
It’s fair to say this framing has an emotional component. This is perhaps a reaction to the calculatedly emotion-free arguments being used to keep the minimum wage so low that people are going hungry and homeless at increasing rates.
The point here is that if 60% of people are living at or below the wage level that the definition implies is not livable, then it is the definition that is wrong.
This is a logical error on your part and/or misunderstanding of the term. “Living Wage” is a suggested approximate threshold recommendation based on an average approximate estimate of living expenses in the region. It is not some value calculated to be that which 100% of living people are achieving. It is not defined as the line above which you’re guaranteed that your life is livable, and it is not defined to mean that if you make less your life is not livable. It is an average, and the line is intentionally drawn to be conservative in the sense that it should work for someone without extra support or being required to cohabitate. Obviously different people have different levels of support, different living standards, different amounts of sharing. It can and does actually occur all over the world that people make less than a living wage, and still manage to live. They’re very poor, and most are unable to escape being poor, but living. They are below a living wage, but that doesn’t make them the contradiction, it is the reality of poverty - the reality is that many people really are living on means below what economists consider a minimum acceptable level.
Personally, I don't think the definition is wrong, or even misleading.
"Living" doesn't always literally mean "to be alive". For example, the idiom "make a living" refers to making enough to keep a decent lifestyle (pay for food, rent, clothing, etc)[1]. I think most people would agree that if you have no income and you live on the street, then you are not making a living, yet you are still living.
Similarly, "living" in "living wage" refers to a standard of living that is deemed decent or acceptable by some measure -- of course this will depend on some subjective determination and that can be debated. But it does not mean literally to be alive (otherwise, the living wage would obviously be $0).
"Wage Requisite for a Single Mother to Support an Entire Family with No Other Income Earners", which is a radically different benchmark than "living wage" which implies "for anybody, in all familial situations".
Yes, this is my point though. The term has been defined in an ivory tower by people who seek to control other people's lives. The use of the term "Living Wage" is a politically charged word that _implies_ it is a number that is required to be hit, but instead it is some number decided by an institution that would like persuasive numerical proof that their pet policies _must_ be implemented.
That wasn't your point, nor was it the point I was rebutting.
I took no issue with the term "ivory tower" (of course all legislature does tend to come from them), but rather positing that what had emerged from that ivory tower "must be wrong if 60% of the people living in NY don't hit the standard. If the city was populated by 60% people who do not earn enough to live" - that's positing that people should be satisfied with subsisting, and anyone who says otherwise "must be wrong".
So what measure would satisfy you? It would seem that numbers coming from people that study the topic extensively is too "ivory tower" for you, so what measure is acceptable?
This is New York State data, not NYC data, which necessitates usage of a car. Insurance, tolls, taxes, depreciation, fuel, maintenance can easily add up to $4k per year.
facepalm yah like what kind of dystopia do we live in where people bring up the fact that workers in the US earn dirt for money and the response from other people is "yeah, but it must be enough because they aren't dead yet, so what is the problem?".
> The "living" in the term Living Wage is about being about to actually live a life, not just survive it.
A bit dramatic? We are well last the survival aspect of living standards. No one is out in the weeds living off the land and wildlife and building shelters unless they absolutely want to.
There is ample food for anyone that wants it and shelter abounds. There’s a lot of help if you not able to do it on your own.
But after that it’s up to you. The government isn’t going to manage your life. You need to be an active participant in your own life.
As with all economic metrics, it's only relevant in context. If you define a living wage standard that others agree is useful - it's useful to understand what portion of your population fits this category. Alternately, it's useful to assess a static standard over time to see if equality problems are getting worse or better.
Having seen both sides of this equation, It's increasingly unclear to me whether wealth inequality has crossed the takeoff threshold where outcomes no longer correlate with Merit. Observationally, I encounter many in high status fields who got their due to familial wealth + guidance on pathway. I worry that we are seeing more people who are wealthy because their parents were wealthy, potentially to the point where labor is no longer required beyond perception maintenance.
Such an arrangement is fundamentally anti-productive to the economy. It removes capital from skilled individuals to support leisure. It reshapes the economy to support the leisurely whims of a few individuals. I don't think its a coincidence that as wages and inflation rose GDP growth rose. It's a reallocation of capital from unproductive sectors to productive sectors.
Yeah like healthcare, emergency funds, basic entertainment, education, food that isn't going to ruin your body, the ability to take medical leave / time off so you don't burn yourself out.
I haven't dug into the methodology, but for example, a lot of apartments in NYC are rent stabilized. There is universal preK. Many receive Medicaid. Also, did they check whether the household has a living wage or just each of its working age inhabitants?
I'm not defending these mitigating factors as a good solution to people's money problems in NYC, but like you say, "living wage" is a fraught term that conjures up vague and charged imagery inappropriate for a rigorous analysis.
> If the city was populated by 60% people who do not earn enough to live
Earning enough to live is a fuzzy idea. I'm not satisfied unless I'm maxing multiple retirement accounts, have a year of saved income, insurance, etc. I think the figure is believable if you're fine with not saving, not having insurance, dodging taxes, etc. An alarming number of people are okay with this.
Looking at the calculator they're using[1], I spend probably 15% less than they say is a living wage for my city, even though I spend more on rent and food. In my case, transportation and healthcare are both estimated too high, and "Civic" and "Other" make up most of the difference.
That calculator is way too optimistic for my area. My girlfriend makes the stated "living" wage, has 20% lower rent (for odd reasons), doesn't pay for a car, and STILL barely makes enough to keep going.
Lets not look at roman slavery as abhorrent, lets reframe it instead, as living organisms, getting a meal, having a roof and occasionally warmth in the winter. Suddenly, the nightmare is not so horrific anymore. And we should ask ourselves, how we can normalize a downfall like this even further. Maybe, this is what humanity always wanted all along. A boot to the face.
That's the intention. Suggesting that there is something wrong with that is implying that it is not designed to be that way. People barely struggling to stay afloat means the system is close to an optimized state. If people have any excesses, it means there's more fat to trim away.
except for the folks at the top .001% who own everything, right? for them its just investment capital.
you know the most disheartening thing I see in these discussions is that common people who are basically 'labor' to the core (maybe ahead of other labors by a bit) defending 'capital'. where its quite clear its a war between labor & capital and we are getting our ass handed to us in last 40 years.
From the headline I had incorrectly guessed this would be just NYC, it's the entire state.
The top 20 jobs for earning a living wage range from podiatrists (81.3%) to plant operators (68.7%). The bottom 20 include cashiers (13.5%), dishwashers (8.3%) and textile machine operators (3.9%).
I don't understand how podiatrists isn't at 100%, WikiPedia has the pay at about what you'd expect a Dr to make. What's that ~20% doing wrong? Just bad at answering this survey or are they really making so little being a Dr?
The median annual podiatric physician salary in the United States was approximately $215,000 as of July 2022, with a wide range depending on years in practice. New podiatrists usually earn significantly less. First-year salaries around $150,000 with performance and productivity incentives are common. Private practice revenues for solo podiatrists vary widely, with the majority of solo practices grossing between $200,000 and $600,000 before overhead
It’s less likely that they’re doing something ‘wrong’, and more likely that factors such as household size and living location drive up the overall cost of living past what potentially their single salary can withstand. A single-earner with a spouse and kid to support living in Manhattan can struggle to keep up even with a $150k+ salary.
Rents and basic living expenses(ie. Food) in particular have spiked citywide since the pandemic, which further exacerbates the issue.
Yes a single expensive chronic medical condition or child with high support needs disability will wipe that right out. $150k isn't poverty anywhere I don't think but it's not rare at all to end up professionally & personally tied to an expensive area with obligations that make it difficult for you to make it work.
This isn't an actual survey of people though. Cornell is saying "The living wage for this county is $xx,000, and xx% of people make less than $xx,000 in this county." They're comparing a range of incomes against essentially the fixed median cost of living.
Consider again that this is the whole state, not just NYC. Much of New York state is badly economically depressed and has been for a long time: Troy, Poughkeepsie, Utica, Binghamton, etc.
> I don’t understand how podiatrists isn’t at 100%?
Maybe residency accounts for some of it? Could also be a significant number of solo practices just getting started? (Gross numbers might be unintuitive or misleading for doctors renting or buying office space and trying to advertise.) Could also be anomalies in the survey, noise in the data and/or how they categorize jobs, perhaps some number of reported podiatrists are podiatry assistants who are in school? Could be some podiatrists choose to serve low income and/or uninsured folks? Maybe a weighted combination of all the above and some other factors?
One of the issues I take with statements like this, is that it defines "living" in a way which is... not the same thing as the definition of "living". Clearly if less than half of the most populous city in the US are earning a "living wage", yet the other half are actually living there, something is not quite right.
As another poster pointed out, this probably mostly due to off-the-books work, which is commonplace and rampant in New York City due to the excessive tax regime and routine corruption in municipal governance. That said, even that likely can't account for all of the discrepancy. A major issue is that they are using the average costs of various categories as the basis for determining the living wage, and don't understand that there are many people who live below that average costs. FTA: "which estimates living wages by county based on household size and local costs including food, housing, transportation, childcare, medical care and taxes." Well, if you don't go to the doctor (or you go to a ghetto doctor under the table), you don't pay taxes, you work walking distance from where you live in the rougher part of town, and you have 6-8 people in your household that is multi-generational and extended family sharing a below-average housing situation, and you have someone (usually the oldest female resident) cooking at home for everyone buying ingredients at the street markets and ensuring the kids are watched, then your costs go down a LOT, and your income goes up from not paying more than 50% effective taxes.
Take this with a grain of salt. MIT's Living Wage Calculator for someone in the Manhattan area calls for $7k annual expense for transportation. In Manhattan. So I think they are attempting to make a granular data set out of a course one.
Where the data gets really suspect is how it tries to predict demand for social services. Except we already know this data. New York's SNAP Participation rate is 84%. So we are not expecting to find millions and millions of new people eligible.
To the broader point, MIT's Living Wage Calculator uses an average of costs across the income bracket and does not account for any welfare or social services. I do not think it is an accurate tool other than for course comparisons between regions.
Programs like Title IX, Medicaid, SNAP, etc exist to help make up these differences. And I think these type of studies are kind of belittling these very effective programs by ignoring them.
The atlas incorporates information from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator [0], which estimates living wages by county based on household size and local costs including food, housing, transportation, childcare, medical care and taxes. For example, the estimated living wage for a single adult with one child in New York County (Manhattan) is $43.18, compared with $33.75 in Onondaga County, which includes Syracuse.
That data is paired with individual-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample [1], which includes self-reported wages. The researchers matched individuals with their estimated living wage based on their locations, occupations and household characteristics, adjusting all wages for inflation to 2022 dollars.
Notably, the MIT living wage incorporates zero savings or cushions. It is a “minimum subsistence wage”, as written below. I would not want to have kids or dependants at the MIT living wage.
> The living wage model is a ‘step up’ from poverty as measured by the poverty thresholds but it is a small ‘step up’, one that accounts for only the basic needs of a family. The living wage model does not allow for what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans. It does not budget funds for pre-prepared meals or those eaten in restaurants. It does not include money for unpaid vacations or holidays. Nor does it provide money income to cover unexpected expenses such as a sudden illness, a major car repair, or the purchase of a household appliance such as a refrigerator. Lastly, it does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g. provisions for retirement or home purchases). The living wage is the basic income standard that, if met, draws a very fine line between the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity. In light of this fact, the living wage is perhaps better defined as a minimum subsistence wage for persons living in the United States.
I work in Onondaga County. The MHI here is very low, according to the Fed it's $65,500 [1]. But that's household income, which includes families with two earners. So the median income in this county is lower than the livable wage MIT calculates for an individual ($33.75 x 2080 = $70,200). These two things don't seem to line up. We should expect MHI to be greater than living wage - or else we are expecting the median household to be falling behind. Should we conclude that median households are falling behind?
> that's household income, which includes families with two earners
If you have a "very low" median income that includes families with two earners, then likely there are many single-earner households in that county that are doing far worse. Many will fall below the living wage threshold.
> Should we conclude that median households are falling behind?
Since you want to talk about medians, what is the median take-home pay? What is the median rent? What percent of pay should rent be? What is it actually?
These numbers are nonsense. No one who isn’t upper middle class is paying $12,000 a year for child care where I live per child. A parent would stop working to remove that cost, which would also potentially reduce housing and food costs by way of a dedicated house cook and maintenance person.
We have many family friends via the kids where the wife stays home largely to reduce costs and handle the house and kids.
Yes, of course what's really happening is that people are relying on off-the-books childcare via informal networks that don't get included in these numbers. We spent $14,782 on child care for one child in 2022, but it's hard not to notice that the parking lot during pickup is full of Audis and BMWs. Wherever poor people are sending their kids, it's not there.
> A parent would stop working to remove that cost, which would also potentially reduce housing and food costs by way of a dedicated house cook and maintenance person.
What? I know of no homeowner in the US, even earning multiple hundred thousands per year, with a dedicated maintenance person or a house cook. Even working two jobs, most couples can manage to cook meals and take care of the house.
Considering that the gross wages of two working adults are 2x base wage, or $72.94. This values stay at home at $23.96, the difference between 2a2w3k of $72.94 and 2a1w3k of $48.98. This suggests an efficiency to performing as an home parent of $12.51 or 34% over wages of $36.47! That is a significant cost in order to obtain the benefits of two income such as income source diversity.
A minimum living wage should assume roomates with maybe 300 square feet per person. I lived on a fishing vessel with far less than that and we survived fine.
The advantage of multiperson abodes is that some amount of that min 300 sqft can be shared since a single body can occupy a maximum of lets say 2x6=12sqft at any point in time. If one assumes 100 sqft of storage for coverings, foodstock and books and another 100 for wet waste and cleaning activities, then that leaves 300-100-100-12=88sqft of sharable space. If two people can share the wet activity space then they effectively get 50sqft back and another 6 if they use differential shifts for laying down or have a relationship where one may lay on top of the other.
On the whole I think it is important to understand the height dimension of space required for a person. This also would address the amount of various gasses needed in circulation since not all 300sqft can be occupied with books--the human would not be able to breathe in order to continue reading.
Fascinatingly, the article does not mention folks with asian ethnicity, nor does the tool allow you to break out race granularly. The Filter by Race-Ethnicity only allows you to choose "White Worker" and "Worker of Color"
I think having a higher percentage of the population coming from the developing world certainly lowers expectations and within their communities they are surprisingly resourceful at pooling resources and supporting one another.
My wife grew up with a single mother in a low paying job didn't realize she was poor until it was time to apply for college and financial aid because she lived far more comfortably than her cousins back home.
This is interesting. I feel that I live pretty comfortably. I went to the Living Wage Calculator, picked my state and county. I have more children than 3. It looks like it's about five dollars an hour per child. With that I don't make a living wage. My food and housing expenses are a bit more than they list. The others are pretty close (depends on the year, but they might average out). Interesting.
MIT's Living Wage calculator is mentioned in the article. It's a great project.
A while back, I toyed with a project which needed to propose/estimate hourly labor prices for a service marketplace. Not wanting to contribute further to gig-economy exploitation, I used the data as a per-hour payment floor.
Although freely readable on their site, structured data is only available upon request. I think having the data more readily available would allow socially conscious businesses to actually fix part of the inequality problems we have, instead of just knowing how bad it is.
My request went un-answered, but I put together JSON and CSV serializations anyway. If this would be of use to anyone else, contact info is in my bio.
The article says that a "Living Wage" for Manhattan is $43.18 / hour, or around $86k base salary.
Maybe Manhattan COL is insane, but I have a hard time imagining that $86k is not enough to live on _anywhere_. Maybe you will have a room mate and cook for yourself every once in a while, but you will be able to support yourself just fine. This makes me seriously question the definition of "Living Wage".
Before we moved in together, my partner was living on just under $80k / year. She could afford a 2 year old car and a nice apartment with 1 roommate comfortably. She couldn't waste money mindlessly, but she did not need to pinch pennies at all.
Manhattan COL is completely ludicrous. I knew a lawyer who lived in an actual closet; it was exactly long enough to hold a small bed and about twice as wide. He shared a bathroom and a kitchen with the owners. He paid $3500/month for this, and he considered it a terrific bargain. (The kitchen was nice.)
One-room appartments in southern Manhattan were being advertised for $1-2 million at the time.
There are some cheaper options in northern Manhattan, and definitely in the other boroughs. But transportation in NYC means the subway and busses (or $$$$$ for taxis and parking), and it's really easy for trips to take 40-60 minutes. So living too far out means a brutal and unpredictable commute.
There are options, obviously. But when living in a literal closet is a good option, plenty of the bad options are pretty awful.
If suburbs were to pay the actual cost for maintaining city-like infrastructure with rural density, the Cost of Living would be equally unreasonable for the suburbanites
Suburbs are not sustainable and requires major and continuous infusion of government aid to be keept afloat
That calculation is for a single person with a child. When rent is ~$2500 bare minimum for a place that can fit 2 people (and that would be a shitty, shitty apartment), you can see how pretty damn quickly $80k / yr doesn't cut it.
I've lived comfortably in Manhattan for well under $80k (as low as $60k) but I didn't have a child, and that was several years ago when rents were lower.
Does this not necessitate that 60% are subsidized in some fashion, e.g. geared-to-income housing, food stamps, etc? That seems like an astronomical number. If that is not the case, then why does the living wage estimate not account for this? What are the unmet minimum standards for 60% of New Yorkers?
One possibility would be living at your parents place. You don’t earn a living wage, but your parents subsidize your existence. That probably accounts for a lot of ~75% of Gen Z not earning a living wage.
Sharing an apartment doesn't mean the minimum standard? I.e. one has to be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment on their own, or else they don't have a living wage?
This could be trivially rigged by walling up the current large open apartment spaces to create very small private apartments - then voila, a large demographic suddenly has a living wage. Yet the living standard would arguably be worse.
Or do we plan on drastically increasing the builds and availability of one-bedroom apartments in a metropolis through sprawl? That doesn't sound very YIMBY.
>Or do we plan on drastically increasing the builds and availability of one-bedroom apartments in a metropolis through sprawl? That doesn't sound very YIMBY.
Not through sprawl necessarily, but yes that's the plan[0][1]
You can also beg for food on the street and technically survive, so there has to be some reasonable standard for what living wage. I'm pretty sure the poster you are replying to is not implying that those 5 people would be splitting a 5 bedroom apartment... Probably more like 5 people in a 2 bedroom.
Absolutely. I know plenty of people in their 20s doing this. Living room converted into bedroom, 4 people (including couples), still paying some 2K in rent a month, but hey its manhattan
A big one is people are probably living in higher densities than the data assumes, eg the housing budget for a living wage assumes 1 single adult will live alone in a studio. In my younger years, I knew a lot of people who were sleeping like 3+ adults in a 1 bedroom in NYC, which obviously not ideal but people make it work if they don't have the money:
"The FMR (HUD Fair Market Rents) estimates include utility costs and vary depending on the number of bedrooms in each unit, from zero to four bedrooms. We assumed that a one adult family would rent a single occupancy unit (zero bedrooms) for an individual adult household, that a two adult family would rent a one bedroom apartment, and that two adult and one or two child families would rent a two bedroom apartment. We further assumed that families with three children would rent a three bedroom apartment (the adults are allocated one bedroom and the children two bedrooms)."
It's a bit confusing at a definitional level too. If 60% don't earn a living wage, how are they surviving? Surely your definition of "living wage" is more of a marketing gimick than anything, if 60% of people manage to "live" without earning the "living wage"?
This definition seems more like - earning a wage that allows living seperately from your parents and without any additional subsidies. Which is not exactly "living". Ask someone in bangladesh or ethiopia about "living wages"
"The living wage model is a ‘step up’ from poverty as measured by the poverty thresholds but it is a small ‘step up’, one that accounts for only the basic needs of a family. The living wage model does not allow for what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans. It does not budget funds for pre-prepared meals or those eaten in restaurants. It does not include money for unpaid vacations or holidays. Nor does it provide money income to cover unexpected expenses such as a sudden illness, a major car repair, or the purchase of a household appliance such as a refrigerator. Lastly, it does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g. provisions for retirement or home purchases)."
Basically: "The living wage is the basic income standard that, if met, draws a very fine line between the financial independence of the working poor and the need to seek out public assistance or suffer consistent and severe housing and food insecurity."
In addition: "In light of this fact, the living wage is perhaps better defined as a minimum subsistence wage for persons living in the United States."
> This definition seems more like...
...you didn't read it, and you are merely complaining about the name of a rose.
> The living wage model does not allow for what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans.
Call it whatever you want... New York being one of the richest states in the United States, saying that the median person in New York cannot afford "what many consider the basic necessities enjoyed by many Americans" is a contradiction. The idea that 60% of New Yorkers are not even at "subsistence" level of wages just makes no sense.
That is what it is meant to describe, but it must also have a definition based on qualifying metrics. If sharing an apartment is tantamount to living below minimum standards, then there is a mismatch with it's descriptor, since wages that don't cover an entire one-bedroom does not necessitate that one is dangerously close to requiring public assistance.
It’s delusional to think that a lot of people from those countries you mentioned wouldn’t want to swap lives with one of those oppressed NYC workers in a second.
Most New Yorkers pay a full-time minimum wage salary in rent every year (or more). It used to be unsustainable for the working class here, now it's unsustainable for anyone but the very rich here.
And it's 100% down to real estate and developers (the land kind). They're ruining our city and turning it into a Disneyland for the megarich.
If people are having to pay a large amount for rent, isn't that based largely on the balance of supply (not enough) and demand (too much) of housing? If that's the case, it's not at all obvious to me that the suppliers of housing units are to blame.
It has a lot more to do with artificial constraints on supply that developers have some part in continuing, as do wealthy homeowners who don't want to let anyone else in. If we automatically upzoned districts where rent increased past a certain threshold (ie remove the constraint on supply), I guarantee you we'd be able to find developers who would build more apartments.
I'm not convinced. Everywhere I look where developers are "allowed" to develop, more like there are giant plots of land for dirt cheap, builders don't make homes that cost $100k, they build homes that cost $450k.
Why would a builder put immense fuss and effort and stress into making a hundred brand new low income homes that will be a pain and suck to get sold and won't be able to charge much for because low income when they can build one mcmansion and be set for like ten years with a good client who will accept a 400% markup because they haven't understood what a dollar is worth in a decade?
That's not how it works. The developers build luxury apartments, and the wealthy people who are living it shitty, 100+ year old buildings (most of Lower Manhattan, for example) move into those buildings. The old, shitty apartments then become less expensive and lower-income people are able to live there.
Suppliers lobby to limit the amount of housing being built. Suppliers build luxury apartment buildings which are out of reach for lower-income residents, further limiting supply in the lower band of the housing market. Surely the suppliers share a large part of the blame here.
> Suppliers lobby to limit the amount of housing being built.
If "suppliers" means "existing homeowners and landlords", then sure.
If "suppliers" means "developers building new real estate", then your assertion is blatantly false. Developers have a financial incentive to build and sell as many units as possible. And in practice they are lobbying to build as much as possible, but are running into problems:
* environmental reviews a.k.a. bored busybodies' legal right to oppose anything being built anywhere and delay your project for years
* regulations limiting how many units can be built on a given lot (height limits, parking minimums, zones prohibiting multifamily buildings)
* regulations making construction unnecessarily expensive (e.g. NYC regulations making it prohibitively expensive for most projects to operate a construction crane)
* racist local politicians who fight tooth and nail against any new units in their neighborhood because then people with the wrong skin color might move in (this applies to local politicians of all skin colors; e.g. see https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2022/03/03/har...).
I think OP mean doing "nothing good". It's not that they are doing nothing.. but the argument is it's certainly not a net positive in terms of overall society.
They are purely benefitting the rich at the expense of everyone else.
No, they pass their taxes and maintenance costs onto me, because what the hell am I going to do, move to a different apartment? They own that one too, if it isn't already full because they haven't built new apartments in my city in 20 years.
At least they didn't. The past couple years they built like three new giant apartment complexes in the city. They all list for 3x the local average rent. They aren't for residents, they are for rich tourists.
So let me get this straight, your landlord also owns every other apartment in your city. Simultaneously, your landlord is responsible for not building any more new housing. But also your landlord did build new housing, but it’s out of your price range so you are angry.
Sounds like your landlord actually lives rent-free, in your head at least.
No the landlords that own the expensive tourist "rentals" aren't the same as my landlord, but my landlord DOES own 4 of the only a few apartment complexes in the area. My apartment complex is run by a property management company that is headquartered in an entirely different state.
Most of the rest of the buildings in my city that house people are shitty 1920s homes that are rented out by small time landlords, complexes intentionally or otherwise meant exclusively for section 8 housing, or literal old age homes. It's more profitable FYI for a builder to erect a giant, luxury old age home right on the most busy street rather than build ANY actual housing, because the state pays them $10k a month to house you at the end of their life, and they pay a nurse $50k a year to look after thirty people a day.
just did the math and you're right. I'm paying the equivalent of a full-time employee at $16 / hr just in rent. Pretty wild when you put it that way...
>Most New Yorkers pay a full-time minimum wage salary in rent every year (or more). It used to be unsustainable for the working class here, now it's unsustainable for anyone but the very rich here.
As as New Yorker with a rent stabilized lease[0], I pay about half in rent what my neighbors do.
Even so, my monthly nut (rent/utilities/ISP/etc., not counting food and other consumables) is ~$4,000.
I could probably cut that to $3,500 or so if I wanted, but not much less.
Add in food, toilet paper, toothpaste, etc. and I'm easily at $4,750-$5000 a month.
That number doesn't include clothing, laundry, hair cuts, doctor visits, transportation and some other stuff, so it's actually a bit higher.
But let's just work with $5,000/month for the moment. That's $60,000/annum net income that's required. As a ballpark (counting FICA, NYC, NYS and Federal taxes), a minimum gross salary of $95,000-$100,000 is required to support that.
But that's just basic necessities. And don't forget, I pay ~1/2 what my neighbors do in rent. So for other folks it's even more onerous.
There certainly are less expensive places to live in NYC, but with my stabilized lease, not so much less expensive for a comparable place, even in the outer boroughs.
So let's assume a single person making minimum wage (in NY, that's $15/hour) and actually able to get 40 hours of work per week.
That's $600/week or $31,200/annum gross pay. Which, including FICA, NYC, NYS and Federal taxes, comes out to ~26%. Meaning net pay is ~$23,000/annum or ~$1,900/month.
According to most recommendations, one shouldn't spend more than 30% of net income on housing. For a minimum wage worker in NYC, that's about $600/month.
And since the median rent in NYC is $3,395/month, a minimum wage worker would need at least two roommates to afford such an apartment and still be paying ~50% of their income on rent.
Yes, half the rentals are less than that. And half are more.
So yes, people can survive on minimum wage and would still be tight making the national median[1] income (~$70,000/annum in 2021).
But even at the US Median income, it's not a "Living Wage" which implies the ability to meet your immediate needs and have a least a small surplus.
So it should come as no surprise that the median income for a single person in NYC is ~93,000, some three times minimum wage.
What does all this say? That NYC is very expensive (housing is the biggest issue) and even those making $100,000/annum are likely to need to make tradeoffs. And someone making minimum wage ($31,200/annum) or even the national median income (~$70,000/annum) will have trouble making ends meet.
>How large / where is is your place if your neighbors pay $8000 a month to rent it?
I didn't say my rent was $4,000 a month. I said my monthly nut (rent, utilities, insurance, ISP, excluding food, clothing, transportation, medical expenses, etc., etc., etc.) was ~$4,000/month.
My place is significantly smaller than a double-wide trailer. And my rent bill is my business and that of my landlord.[0]
Have a good day!
[0] Since rent stabilized leases have an upper limit to the rent charged to remain rent stabilized, you can get an upper limit to that with a little research. Good luck.
For most people if they're paying $4000 a month the majority of that is going towards rent. Utilities, insurance (for a renter), ISP will rarely be over $500 a month, but maybe one of these things is really expensive in your location.
Yep. My rent is more than half of my monthly nut. Why would you think otherwise based on what I said?
My renter's insurance is ~$100/year. The bigger issue (for me at least) is the ~$1,000/month (plus $600 deductible and $40 copays) I pay for crappy health insurance.
I assumed that most of your $4,000 a month was going towards rent, which would mean your neighbors are paying close to $8,000 a month. That's a very large number so I asked about that.
This was apparently wrong enough for you to want to correct me (without saying what your neighbors actually pay). That made me then try to understand if you have really high fees. This also doesn't seem to be the case.
Most of my neighbors are Columbia students who pack three or four people into an apartment, while I live alone.
I'll clarify. Again. The rent on most of the apartments in my building is ~2x what I pay in rent. One of a trio sharing an apartment pays less for rent (rather, mommy and daddy do) than I do for rent.
I have other expenses as well.
I don't give lots of detail because I'm not interested in publishing my budget online. If that perturbs you, my apologies.
>Accommodation and food services, part of the state’s important tourism sector, is the industry least likely to pay a living wage, with more than 52% of workers earning less
I have to wonder how badly the stats here are distorted by the fact that the hospitality sector is one of the worst offenders in terms of paying wages 'under the table'. Many folks in that sector formally report abysmally low wages on tax returns but are making decent day to day wages paid from off-the-books cash flow.
How are so many people (including more than 20% of doctors, if the article is to be believed) surviving if they don't make a living wage? Tbh my main takeaway from the article is to wonder if their "living wage" calculation is broken or defined in a confusing way.
I see a super simple explanation: New York is most known for it's regulated rentals. Surely if we take into account currently advertised rental prices, almost no one there will earn a living wage. But people must be locked into much lower, regulated rentals for decades.
I have to chuckle a bit each time I read about “living wages” and such in the developed world, having spent my years from 18-24 on an equivalent of about 250$/month in Eastern Europe. And yes, I also had to pay my rent from that money (which consumed about 60% of that). I would have considered myself rich if I traded places with those Americans living below the “living wage”, so it’s hard to muster much empathy for their living conditions. And I can’t be the only one as Eastern Europe is still much richer than most of the world.
> the estimated living wage for a single adult with one child in New York County (Manhattan) is $43.18
52 * 40 * 43.18 = 89814.4. So basically, they estimate ~$90k is the living wage in Manhattan for a single adult with one child. When I moved here several years ago (single and childless) I was making ~$60k and while I wasn't in poverty by any stretch, I certainly didn't have a lot of wiggle room in my budget. Adding a child onto that, plus inflation, I think that figure checks out.
Ancient Romans had aqueducts and public bathhouses while many (even centuries later) did not. Today, everyone gets treated clean water coming to them personally!
Roman citizens had an average wage which today would be considered extreme poverty. It all depends on what you mean by “living wage”.
Public services are available to everyone. Public WiFi. Emergency medicine. Medicaid. Clean and safe potable water. The only issue is rent and shelters but NYC is inefficient. It’s not even lack of housing: https://nypost.com/2022/04/26/nycs-filled-just-200-of-2500-e...
Also NYC is really gentrified and rents are so high. Yet young people choose to move here and share an apartment, because they like the city and opportunity. They eat out in restaurants, something previous generations couldn’t afford. Today, many people don’t shop in supermakets and cook, like people in the 80s did - they order in. They buy tons of stuff to be delivered.
My friend works in homeless services and says they are using the homeless to create jobs … his own job is to work with the security guards that work with the homeless … ironically it would cost less to just give the homeless homes and jobs LOL.
This is just one example. And the irony is that NYC homeless people are the same as other NYC-ers .. they endure the cold and the high prices but don’t want to move somewhere warmer and far more affordable! Even our homeles are snobs LOL
Is this a misleading/attention grabbing headline, or does TFA just do a poor job of describing the data? Based on some quick googling about 29% of the NY population is age 21 or younger, and 13% is 65 or older. That's 42% of the population that I wouldn't really expect to be earning a living wage. You still end up with a third of working age adults who aren't making a living wage (~60% of the population is working age, ~40% of the population makes a living wage). At first glance that still seems like a shocking number, but if you start thinking about the numbers of stay at home parents, people on disability, part time workers, etc. it has to trim the number down quite a bit. What really seems to be missing is intent, i.e. how many people are working in a job where they don't really expect a living wage?
The "living wage" housing costs for Manhattan are $22,852 [0] while there are quite a few 2-bedroom apartments listed for rent below $3,000 per month [1]
So 2 single people sharing a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan are not earning a "living wage"? I don't think that's how most people would define the term
How sad is it that the top comments (currently) are all excusing this. "They live beyond their means.", "They take money under the table.", "They're willing to do this to live in NYC.", etc etc
STOP IT!
JUST STOP IT!
The past 40 odd years have had a HUGE TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE TOP! It never trickled down. People are getting screwed harder today than in nearly a century.
Why is this not phrased as "60% of NY jobs don't pay enough for you to survive in NY"?
Or more likely (speculating) "At least three quarters of NY jobs trap workers in poverty"?
The fact that people have found some way to surivive by bending or breaking rules, or have some precarious "solution" that could fail at a moment's notice, is irrelevant.
FTA:
> including less than one-third among people of color and younger workers.
It's showing the data for that.
I'm not sure why you'd necessarily feel the need to add race when the point was the age group of the people for one specific stat. Do you think people are using "millenials" as a race?
Yet somehow the other 60%, who are not earning a living wage, are still living. A better name than "living wage" needs to be used if they want me to understand what they're talking about.
Do you require that every vocabulary definition be obvious and intuitive to you before you make an effort to understand the effect being described? Fields other than your own have jargon with its own history and justification, it seems a shallow basis to dismiss data on.
Anyway no one "wants you" to understand anything and won't shape the world so that it's comfortable for you to. If you choose not to try that's on you.
Maybe semantics (but then again I think a ton of leftwing phrases are just semantics and overloading words), but how do 40% of New Yorkers continue to be alive if not at a "living wage"?
I think this is actually important in one key respect: if you want to solve a problem, you have to be clear about what it is or you're going to run into issues. "People don't have a living wage" sounds dire, until you realize by living wage they mean something significantly different and now I don't take you seriously (because its clear you just tried to manipulate me). Just say "people deserve better wages and aren't getting them". It's not as dire or manipulative, but I can definitely get behind that nonetheless.
There's a kind of language creep throughout all of these discussions. When people are no longer hungry, we start talking about the "food insecure" in the same terms. Nobody ever seems to notice that we went from "hungry" to "food insecure" or even what "food insecure" is supposed to mean (although I'm sure it has some academic definition). What I do know is that when I was briefly on food stamps my food budget doubled and I wasn't ever anywhere near going hungry on the prior budget, so it's really hard to know what I'm supposed to take away from these designations.
It's a hard problem. The flip side is, there's gotta be a way to talk about problems that exist today even if they're less severe than the ones in the past. When we talk about "medical malpractice" today, the bad treatment is typically much better than what you would have gotten 100 years ago, but I don't think that proves it's a bad term.
It’s politics. The term was synthetically created to push a political agenda. The term was chosen to be as emotionally-charged as possible: “How can you be against paying people a Living Wage?”
We can and should talk about problems like this, but I hate that it is being done in such a nakedly political and disingenuous way.
What better term would you propose? I've seen "decent wage", "honest wage", and "fair wage", but they all have similar issues. I'm not sure there's any term that wouldn't become emotionally charged when used for the phenomenon of "some people are paid a lot less than I think they ought to be".
While the term "fair wage" is obviously something that's more "arguable" (e.g. what's fair?) it seems to me a less loaded phrase than "living wage," the alternative to which, on its face, seems to imply death.
There is actually a fairly firm definition of food insecurity. I have some links in this post [1]
It is based on survey data with set questions. Answering yes to any of the following can categorize you as food insecure
A parent lost weight (for any reason)
Adult(s) cut size or skipped meals in 3 or more months of the year
Relied on few kinds of low-cost food to feed child(ren)
If Elon Musk skips breakfast to lose weight and succeeds, his family qualifies as food insecure.
This is why you see very different summary statistics. 1 in 5 children suffer food insecurity versus 0.9% of children have gone hungry at lest once in the last year.
I think I actually made a comment to this effect recently (although perhaps not on HN? Can't recall now). I think your idea of phrase overloading is an interesting one; often it seems that words lose their severity / intended effect, so new words are adopted. To the point of a sibling comment, homeless has now become "unhoused," to infer a different connotation or slight nuance over what is traditionally or stereotypically thought of the homeless population, perhaps. "Dire" and "manipulative" drive attention, and that is indeed the goal for better (to drive change) or worse (to profit from attention).
A living wage isn't what's just enough to stay alive, it includes what's required for a satisfying life (my words, not part of any definition).
If you look in the source data from the article, expenses are broken down into categories like food, child care, housing, etc. There are also categories for "civic" and "other", which together can account for 20-30% of expenses.
It's hard to have a meaningful discussion about this from a click-baity headline without diving into the details.
It’s the same thing with “homeless,” the propaganda driven branding is actually harming finding a solution by causing confusion. See, also, “abolish the police.”
NYC, by virtue of being relatively compact and with high population density, of course requires fewer dollars per capita to provide the same services as a spread-out suburban enclave. But it doesn't take in less money than that suburb. It takes in significantly more.
They tax property at a higher rate. If you rent, your rent includes the taxes. You pay either way, the specific tax structure doesn't make a huge impact. If the city provides services, you're paying for them.
I wish people like you would quit apologizing for mismanaged governments that steal and waste so much money. There are clear examples of prosperous states where they don’t tax at all and they have thriving middle classes, good jobs for all that want them, and just as much infra as a high tax state.
It’s like denying “the science” when we have clear empirical evidence the people of a state can thrive without high taxes and that lots of people will not thrive in a high tax state. It’s clear, don’t you see it? Why do you deny what is in front of you and obvious?
I’m not sure there’s a specific number. For me personally, it would feel fairer if the city and state weren’t flagrantly, openly, unapologetically inefficient and wasteful.
But that would be a tax the mega rich can not avoid, we can not have that as long as the mega rich dictate all important decisions via "donations" (the US word for bribe)
They are quite poor compared to NYC standards, but the idea that 60% of those people are not earning enough to maintain the lifestyle that Americans typically expect is just not credible.
I recently drained my bank account so low I wouldn't be able to pay the rent.
I've been working 2 years on a solo startup in fits and starts. I've never in my life ever had to worry about missing rent. There was always a good savings safety net.
It was such an incredible experience. It was this distinct feeling of not being able to breathe - of a tightness in the chest. Really unique to me.
I listened to a Joe Rogan podcast recently and he talked about his experience of first making a decent paycheck after going for years being a comedian barely making rent each month. He also described the feeling of "not being able to breathe".
I've never understood this feeling until now.
You enter a kind of panic first. "Even if I do this, this and this perfectly over the next few days/weeks, I am still going to be in shit and its not enough." For knowledge work, I find I need to be relaxed to allow the mind to work creatively to find solutions. This felt heavily restrained. When I needed full mental capacity to pull myself out of this ditch, it felt that this was the worst possible environment for it.
However there are benefits. By being forced into a "survival mode", you develop intense focus, and you have full clarity on your critical path. But at the same time, I didn't feel like I was going to be most time-efficient doing those necessary tasks because of the pressure.
On personal reflection, I wasted a lot of time working on the wrong things, and not planning ahead, and a lot of procrastination - probably ADD related.
Applied to the economy as a whole, it does feel like living paycheck to paycheck is a forcing function that leads to efficiency. If you let people do whatever they want without pressure, they will get nothing done. It's why we have homework deadlines. And I think it really depends on personality types too. But it definitely does strangle creativity. Although I'm sure you can adjust to it.
The biggest realization though is that there are probably a lot of people feeling this physical feeling, which is not a nice feeling, and doesn't let them achieve their full potential. It also explains a lot of socialist political viewpoints. Some from a place of empathy, but also some of jealousy/unfairness when you see other people living in such excess.
Maybe, just maybe instead of liveable wages we should be asking why the hell are our fixed costs so high?
How about instead of jacking up wages, we lower the costs that make those untenable wages tenable.
Start b eliminating real estate investors and forcing landlords OUT of residential real estate entirely.
Gasp I know, denying monopoly cash to the parasite class.
You're ignoring that, it's entirely possible allow Y people to live there, without increasing numeric margins on rents. Instead, landlords/investors often look to maximize their profit margin as much as demand allows.
Which shows, that investors can be a factor to the problem, by either choosing to maximize profits for selfish gain, or keep rents minimized despite excess demand.
Land is owned almost everywhere in the US. The point is if regulations on density are relaxed then denser housing will be built. You don’t need to take anybody’s land. Invisible hand of the market and all that.
This is bolshevism.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-remote-work-is-killi...
There are plenty of empty sky scrapers in midtown NYC.
Want to know why they aren't turning them into apartments?
> Building codes
I'm sorry but if we want affordable housing then it's time to accept that some apartments won't have windows.
I honestly don’t understand how people stomach living in NYC. Income inequality basically fuels the operation of the city, especially post-COVId. Yeah you don’t need a car. Because some recent Bangladeshi immigrant will work for nothing delivering your food, driving you to a bar when it’s cold, etc.
If taken at face value, doesn't this imply that the remaining 60% of New Yorkers not earning a living wage are either living in poverty, or on their way there? That can't be right.
Seems like there's data missing from this calculation. Or gross oversimplification for the sake of clickbaity ideological articles.
Is there a generally accepted consensus on the difference between the two? I've seen articles that define as below living wage as poverty line for a family of four. [1] Seems hard to find a universal definition. Are we just talking about lower class vs lower middle class?
To put it in perspective, everyone is dramatically above the poverty line here. Living wage is >2x the poverty line. You can get food, clothes, entertainment, etc. in a "living wage".
To me, if this is true, people should leave. Move where you get more bang-for-your-buck. As that happens, the wages will be forced to increase and prices will come down.
Fundamentally, if people are fine living in New York with those wages, who are we to stop them? If they want to move to have a higher quality of life in some suburb, that's fine (quality of life being: more stuff, cheaper, not in a smelly city, more disposable income)
There is a large, technically illegal, economy to NYC which doesn't appear in W-2s, 1099s or self-reported census income, that most people outside of it generally aren't aware of. I'm not saying that the situation is good, but "60% of New Yorkers are not earning a living wage" is inaccurate. The existence of this grey economy makes it very difficult to measure income and expenses for a large proportion of New Yorkers.
[edit]: As an example, I have a friend who grew up in a working class family in south Brooklyn. His mother's job was "on the books" and his father's construction work was completely off-the-books, paid in cash. Everybody in the family was very aware of the amount of money you could deposit in a bank account, in a given time period, without attracting IRS attention.
Recently, they bought a building in Brooklyn for a low million dollar figure, after pooling together informal loans from family members and friends. But their household was probably below the "living" wage, from the point of view of this data set, for the past 25 years.