6 ms·

Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anythi

Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Also, I have an employee Al who lives with his parents, so he doesn't need to pay anything for housing. Bob is single but has to pay for his own apartment. Carol is a single mom of 4 who needs to pay for her housing and everything for her kids. So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job?

verall 2y ago
> Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Because they are afraid of being homeless?
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Most landlords don't accept partial rent if your salary isn't earning you enough.
  - CrispyKerosene 2y ago
    I can tell which side of the track you grew up on. It's called surviving and we do it because the other outcome is death.
  - verall 2y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is - most people will go extreme distances to avoid becoming homeless: - commuting from a lower cost area >60m away - using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off) - begging or selling themselves on the internet - negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
    - klabb3 2y ago
      Not to mention crime like theft, fraud, burglaries. But yes, a perpetual underclass has giant negative externalities. The status quo is deeply ingrained to the American psyche - the risk of someone taking advantage of handouts trumps all other concerns. Not having public bathrooms, but clean up shit from the streets. Not having preventative health care, but still providing legally mandated ambulance rides and critical care. Letting poor people who get an unexpected expense (say medical or car breaks down) fall into unemployment, homelessness and crime or – costliest of all – the prison industrial complex. Paying the bill isn’t the problem. People are happy to overspend public funds, so this isn’t related to small government or just general tax aversion. The problem is simply that someone might get something they didn’t deserve. So in a perverted way, it’s a kind of a moralistic obsession with fairness.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough. I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: the US minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, while inflation never stopped. And minimum wage itself as it is today is broken; on the one side, it seems to be more of a suggestion anyway, given that the service industry does not need to conform to it (because the assumption is that wage is stipended by tips). And the other thing to consider is that if an employer pays you minimum wage, they would pay you less if they were legally allowed to.
    - talldatethrow 2y ago
      If there weren't land lords, where would renters live? Would they build shacks in the forest and fields? Would they build custom homes on lots in the desert? Im not sure if most are capable nor well funded enough. Do we give them houses?
      - dirtyhippiefree 2y ago
        In a perfect world…wait, we’re clearly not in a perfect world… “Wouldn’t it be nice” is no way to live a life…FWIW…
    - yojo 2y ago
      I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.” A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units. I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors. 1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations. 2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star). 3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro. At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords. We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.
- luqtas 2y ago
  there's also the "everyone is essential to maintain society"
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Because any job is better than no job; if nobody will hire you for whatever reason, your standards for income will drop until someone does. That said, in my country (Netherlands), a lot of service industry jobs (waiting, dishwashing, store restocking, etc) are jobs that people have temporarily or part-time during their studies. But it's a crooked comparison as tipping culture is still very much optional over here and staff gets paid more. As for your update, in a free capitalist economy, no, you don't need to pay Carol more than the others, you pay her a fair wage according to laws, hours paid, etc; if that is not enough for her to cover the cost of living + raising kids, the government needs to compensate. As an employer you can support her private life by offering flexible hours, of course. That said, in an idealized, socialist country, people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody has to work to make ends meet. Unfortunately, this is often not compatible with capitalism or government policies / expenditure.
- massysett 2y ago
  > nobody has to work to make ends meet Which means that other people who do go to work support those who sit around and do nothing. As someone who works, I have no desire to support people who don't work because they don't have to.
  - eszed 2y ago
    Please notice that you are responding to a position the GP did not take. He said > people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody _has_ to work to make ends meet. Parents who leave paid employment to raise children are far from "sit[ing] around and do[ing] nothing". If we value future conditions (even restricting that calculation only to economic productivity, though I'd argue other considerations also matter) then investing resources in raising and educating children is rational, even for those of us who don't have them ourselves.
    - nradov 2y ago
      In the US we have a Child Tax Credit which is available to almost all parents regardless of employment status. This is a direct credit, not just an income tax deduction. So as a society we are investing resources in raising children, although I suppose you could argue that the amount ought to be higher. https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/938 https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/938
lubujackson 2y ago
In theory, that's where govt subsidies come in.
Dylan16807 2y ago
> So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job? They all get the same wage. The minimum is set to be enough for a chosen living situation, and everyone gets at least that much. (Though some subsidies to help with kids would be reasonable.)
roughly 2y ago
> Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn’t provide those things? Because renting a room is cheaper than renting an apartment, because ramen for 2 meals a day will cause medical problems that show up later than hunger, because some medicine is better than no medicine, because there’s an entire gradation of misery between “paid a living wage” and dying tomorrow.

verall 2y ago

> Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn't provide those things? Because they are afraid of being homeless?

IncreasePosts 2y ago
Most landlords don't accept partial rent if your salary isn't earning you enough.
- CrispyKerosene 2y ago
  I can tell which side of the track you grew up on. It's called surviving and we do it because the other outcome is death.
- verall 2y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is - most people will go extreme distances to avoid becoming homeless: - commuting from a lower cost area >60m away - using food banks or not paying less critical bills (like utilities you usually have a few months before they start shutting things off) - begging or selling themselves on the internet - negotiating with their landlord who is often happy to have less money than an onerous eviction None of these are positive things - they all have nasty negative externalities. Jobs that give money but not enough at all to live on leave desperate people in a terrible limbo.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Not to mention crime like theft, fraud, burglaries. But yes, a perpetual underclass has giant negative externalities. The status quo is deeply ingrained to the American psyche - the risk of someone taking advantage of handouts trumps all other concerns. Not having public bathrooms, but clean up shit from the streets. Not having preventative health care, but still providing legally mandated ambulance rides and critical care. Letting poor people who get an unexpected expense (say medical or car breaks down) fall into unemployment, homelessness and crime or – costliest of all – the prison industrial complex. Paying the bill isn’t the problem. People are happy to overspend public funds, so this isn’t related to small government or just general tax aversion. The problem is simply that someone might get something they didn’t deserve. So in a perverted way, it’s a kind of a moralistic obsession with fairness.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough. I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: the US minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, while inflation never stopped. And minimum wage itself as it is today is broken; on the one side, it seems to be more of a suggestion anyway, given that the service industry does not need to conform to it (because the assumption is that wage is stipended by tips). And the other thing to consider is that if an employer pays you minimum wage, they would pay you less if they were legally allowed to.
  - talldatethrow 2y ago
    If there weren't land lords, where would renters live? Would they build shacks in the forest and fields? Would they build custom homes on lots in the desert? Im not sure if most are capable nor well funded enough. Do we give them houses?
    - dirtyhippiefree 2y ago
      In a perfect world…wait, we’re clearly not in a perfect world… “Wouldn’t it be nice” is no way to live a life…FWIW…
  - yojo 2y ago
    I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.” A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units. I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors. 1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations. 2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star). 3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro. At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords. We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.
luqtas 2y ago
there's also the "everyone is essential to maintain society"

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Because any job is better than no job; if nobody will hire you for whatever reason, your standards for income will drop until someone does. That said, in my country (Netherlands), a lot of service industry jobs (waiting, dishwashing, store restocking, etc) are jobs that people have temporarily or part-time during their studies. But it's a crooked comparison as tipping culture is still very much optional over here and staff gets paid more. As for your update, in a free capitalist economy, no, you don't need to pay Carol more than the others, you pay her a fair wage according to laws, hours paid, etc; if that is not enough for her to cover the cost of living + raising kids, the government needs to compensate. As an employer you can support her private life by offering flexible hours, of course. That said, in an idealized, socialist country, people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody has to work to make ends meet. Unfortunately, this is often not compatible with capitalism or government policies / expenditure.

massysett 2y ago
> nobody has to work to make ends meet Which means that other people who do go to work support those who sit around and do nothing. As someone who works, I have no desire to support people who don't work because they don't have to.
- eszed 2y ago
  Please notice that you are responding to a position the GP did not take. He said > people can choose whether they work or stay home raising a family, and nobody _has_ to work to make ends meet. Parents who leave paid employment to raise children are far from "sit[ing] around and do[ing] nothing". If we value future conditions (even restricting that calculation only to economic productivity, though I'd argue other considerations also matter) then investing resources in raising and educating children is rational, even for those of us who don't have them ourselves.
  - nradov 2y ago
    In the US we have a Child Tax Credit which is available to almost all parents regardless of employment status. This is a direct credit, not just an income tax deduction. So as a society we are investing resources in raising children, although I suppose you could argue that the amount ought to be higher. https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/938 https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/938

lubujackson 2y ago

In theory, that's where govt subsidies come in.

Dylan16807 2y ago

> So should I pay Carol the most, Bob the 2nd most, and then Al the least, even though they're all doing the same job? They all get the same wage. The minimum is set to be enough for a chosen living situation, and everyone gets at least that much. (Though some subsidies to help with kids would be reasonable.)

roughly 2y ago

> Why would anyone take the job then, if it didn’t provide those things? Because renting a room is cheaper than renting an apartment, because ramen for 2 meals a day will cause medical problems that show up later than hunger, because some medicine is better than no medicine, because there’s an entire gradation of misery between “paid a living wage” and dying tomorrow.