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10 years ago, the rule was rent should not be more than 1/4 of your gross salary. The rule just gets adjusted, we're currently at 1/3. Same thing goes down with
by config_yml 7y ago
10 years ago, the rule was rent should not be more than 1/4 of your gross salary. The rule just gets adjusted, we're currently at 1/3. Same thing goes down with health care costs. People are squeezed for it, because they have no choice. Meanwhile wages are stagnating and can't keep up with the rising cost of living.
- throwaway_law 7y agoYep, so now the US government is providing the following helpful formula 33% of salary goes to taxes; 33% to housing and 33% to student loans. You better be good at budget because everything else must be covered by that 1%
- CountSessine 7y agoWhy should wages go up to match outrageous expenses? People are being squeezed, but your pay is roughly correlated with the value of your labour. I hear this all the time in Vancouver - people blaming this squeeze on stagnant wages - as if the labour market could ever pay people enough to keep pace with supply-constrained, monopolistic markets. The rent is too damn high. And we know why, but ... somehow we just want to throw more money in the fire? You can pay people however much you want, but without addressing the market dysfunctions all of those higher wages will wind up in the hands of landlords and health insurance companies.
- kornakiewicz 7y ago> but your pay is roughly correlated with the value of your labour. It is not. The value fire-fighters, teachers or nurses provide is much higher than, say, an enterprise developer, yet in most places the other earns more.
- sjg007 7y agoFirefighters can make bank.. overtime and all that. Teachers are underpaid and nurses are probably too but they too can do well working overtime etc...
- monocasa 7y agoFirefighters and teachers are normally overtime exempt salary. And it's not really fair to nurses to say "you only get a fair wage if you're putting in 60-80 hours". It's also not fair to their patients, as care quality drops pretty hard when you over work nurses and doctors.
- Jiig 7y agoThere is something seriously wrong the with the idea that its ok to underpay these very important jobs because they can eek out a living wage by working every hour of their waking life, sacrificing mental and physical health to do so.
- Fernicia 7y agoIt's marginal utility, not labour value or labour usefulness that determines wage price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value
- strken 7y agoWhat's the marginal value of hiring another fire-fighter? I suspect it's a lot lower than the marginal value of hiring another enterprise developer, since firefighting is already fairly well staffed and since hiring professionals cuts into volunteering firefighting organisations. The same seems like it's true of teachers and nurses. They're seen as a cost centre to be reduced rather than a scarce resource to be fought over.
- pkaye 7y agoSome of those people do make a pretty good salary in California though. For example in Oakland, the Fire Department Captain makes $472k/year. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/oakland/ https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/oakland/
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoHow many positions for Oakland Dept Fire Captain are there? I’m in the market.
- scarejunba 7y agoYour premise is not unquestionable. On what is your value claim based?
- throwaway_law 7y ago>but your pay is roughly correlated with the value of your labour. It should be but employee efficiency and revenue per employee has increased (in fact more than doubled on average in the last 20 years), but salary has roughly stayed the same.
- foobarian 7y agoI wonder if a group of disgruntled engineers could up and buy a large piece of land somewhere and start a town with better ground rules that would avoid the NIMBY/rent seeking traps. Would need to limit property ownership in a major way somehow.
- sudosteph 7y agoI'm convinced that housing cooperatives are going to become more mainstream for exactly this reason. I know other millennials who would do a co-op in a heartbeat The biggest hurdles are setting up the legal terms and the fact that financing is much harder than for single family homes (no FHA loans).
- iamasoftwaredev 7y ago> but your pay is roughly correlated with the value of your labour. If that was true businesses wouldn't show profit (or would show low profit margins consistently) because the value of the workers labour would have been been paid back to them. Plus that whole thing about these billion/trillion dollar SV tech companies engaging in massive wage fixing. You're paid the absolute minimum amount of money the company thinks they can get away with.
- iamasoftwaredev 7y ago10 years ago it was absolutely 1/3.