Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.
Including tariffs. (Blanket) tariffs are almost like a special tax on poor people.
Explanation: to a well off person, 25% higher gas or food prices is just an annoyance. Nothing in their day to day life will change because of that. To a poor person it's brutal.
And climate change…
Or related to capital, politics, etc.
Thank you for saying this.
That's the myth of Trickle-down economics in action.
The same thing happens in other countries too BTW. Prime example is Japan, where prime minister Abe promoted this nice lie for many long years
What slowing wage growth? For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right? It hasn’t even kept up with inflation. The recent bill actually makes it much worse.
As far as I can tell, over the last few years at least, that's mostly not true: wages outpaced inflation, and it outpaced inflation more for lower-income workers than higher.
> In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)
If these reports say that things are better for low income people, why do people living that reality overwhelmingly disagree? Any statistics derived from inflation figures are doomed to be wrong when the inflation data was wrong to begin with.
I'm not in the US, but our inflation data was just as wrong as I've heard the US data was. Official numbers were 10% but literally everything went up at least 20%. Everyone I spoke to had their cost of living increase by significantly more than the official inflation figures.
And when "real wage growth" over 4 years is deemed to be just 13%, it's essentially guaranteed that real wage growth was in fact negative when you consider the disparity between real and official inflation figures. Statistics such as food insecurity rate, personal savings rate, and credit card delinquency rate would certainly support that.
> why do people living that reality overwhelmingly disagree
Because a hard life feels harder when prices rise. If you're at the bottom of the wage statistics, even a large increase in salary (eg. 20%) will still leave you struggling day to day, before inflation in your costs.
> Official numbers were 10% but literally everything went up at least 20%
Inflation numbers consider a wide variety of things. It's probably at least partially the reality that the necessities are rising faster than discretionary purchases. As an example, iPhones are "cheaper" today accounting for inflation since Apple hasn't raised prices much, especially on the high end. Obviously the poorest X% of people aren't buying new iPhones, so they don't get those savings.
Anecdotally, my grocery bill for packaged goods has risen dramatically, while my produce costs are flat. I'm a vegetarian so IDK about meat costs. My utilities have risen, my housing costs have risen, and my subscription prices have risen. Meanwhile, most of my other non-travel spending (eg. home goods like towels, electronics, etc) is pretty flat for years.
the reports are written by people who are not in the same wage category. that is why they don't reflect the lived experiences of these people.
facts and experiences are two very different things. Despite wages going up, poor people can still experience hardship and the feeling of always missing out / having less. it's a matter of contrast, not numbers. And that contrast, that's formed by lived experiences, not some report numbers or percentages thrown around here n there.
Policies should aim to elevate lived experiences of people, not change some numbers here and there to make the facts more confortable morally -_-.
I'm obviously not an expert, but assumed the same thing. I watched a fast food joint near me go from 9/hr to 21/hr in just a few years. Maybe that was just pandemic pricing, I don't know.
But getting >2x salary in such short order is outpacing pretty much everyone else, percentage wise.
This probably means that those wages were being suppressed hard for years and they finally weren't able to hire people at that wage anymore
You're probably right, but it ultimately leads to wage compression which is for most of the middle class a disaster.
You don't have to look far to see everyday people complaining about the price of a burger or movie ticket.
IMHO, it doesn't "lift all boats", it pulls down the middle and upper middle classes. Yeah, the lower wage jobs made more money, but they didn't gain much if anything in affordability, since all of the necessities are produced by people also demanding more money.
All arguments against lower class people getting higher wages are IMHO wildly inappropriate.
"you need lower wages to avoid wage compression", "you need lower wage so we can have more employed people"...
If wage compression occurs, then companies have to deal with Theo senior employees seeking elsewhere - or pay them fairly.
Today, I'd agree. It felt like a dirty thing to even write.
Historically, the lower wage jobs were for kids or bored folk, who'd eventually move onto something better and higher wages.
Recently, the economy isn't great and people take what they can find. There's absolutely no shame in that. I know people in tech who were making low to mid 6 figures now doing retail. The jobs just aren't there, and I constantly fear I'll be in the same boat soon.
But that inevitably does lead to wage compression, which to be clear isn't the fault of the lower wage earners.
>I know people in tech who were making low to mid 6 figures now doing retail.
But people on HN said they don't even get out of bed for a 140k remote job. What gives?
> All arguments against lower class people getting higher wages are IMHO wildly inappropriate.
This kind of emotional reasoning is wildly inappropriate IMHO.
The commenter is not making an argument against lifting lower class wages. They’re making an observation of how economic theory may apply to this scenario.
> pay them fairly
Define “fairly”?
> Define “fairly”?
In this context of wage compression it is fairly easy as it is just ensuring that they are paid comparatively more than the more junior employees that apparently are getting the same or close to the same salary.
They said it’s bad for one group and neutral for another. How is that not an argument against it?
If I make the observation that some vaccines can have anaphylaxis as a side effect, am I making an argument against vaccinations? Obviously not. In that case, you’d take precautions at vaccination sites: have EpiPens available, make people wait 15min after taking the shot before leaving.
In this case, I’m sure you can apply yourself and think of ways we can counter the effects of wage compression now that we’ve unemotionally identified the fact that it occurs.
To stay in your vaccine narrative: if I say that you expose other people to a health risk for not getting vaccinated - then yes this is an argument for getting vaccinated.
The observation is not that vaccines have (side)-effects, but how these effects affect other people.
And that is what loads the argument.
Good lord. “Poor people don’t benefit from increased wages since poor people make all the stuff they buy” is quite a take. This site is incredible, five stars.
I imagine how cost of living/inflation is calculated became a lot more complex in the past few years which skews the comparison. Especially because of cost of buying homes and cost of renting and greater disparity between rural and urban in the context of increasingly higher urban populations.
Also, predatory debt trapping, in part due to social media exposure and student loans, is way bigger thing now.
That's a study that underestimates growth in cost of living, i.e. gouging by rent seekers and businesses, and ignores changes in status, i.e. people leaving the job market or moving down to something worse. It's not surprising that the lowest income earners got a substantial boost in that period, since life is getting substantially more expensive. Importantly, I don't think their "real wage" inflation adjusted values are fair. People being told inflation was one amount when their actual CoL was vastly outpacing that was part of what fueled the anger that got Trump elected again, not that he has helped (or will help) anything since '23 where that analysis ends.
Anecdotally, many people I know would be in dire straits if they didn't own appreciating real property, because their cost of living adjustments at work aren't coming close to matching inflation. Others I know are actually in dire straits. Some are doing fine and getting the benefit of profitable work. Overall things have been awful economically post-COVID, and there are a lot of causal factors, from the policy decisions of the last decade, to the surprises of COVID, natural disasters and geopolitics, to the AI investment bubble and the changing zeitgeist. (Oh and let's not forget simple demographics, birth rate, etc...)
Activists love to use the Federal Minimum Wage, which has not increased in a long time (16 years), as their basis for that claim, ignoring how few workers are actually paid the Federal Minimum Wage. It's become a worthless metric for anything other than misleading arguments.
In addition to state and local governments setting their own minimums, the decline in young people and competition for workers in that sector from food delivery companies, has put wage pressure on fast food companies. Most wouldn't be able to open their doors if they tried to pay the Federal Minimum Wage. Had it been pegged to inflation, it would be $10.90/hour, which is less than what fast food workers are paid almost anywhere.
> For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right?
No. Nominal wages grew from ‘21 to ‘23, hitting all-time highs in ‘24 [1].
> It hasn’t even kept up with inflation
It did [2].
Maybe dramatically increasing the supply of something lowers its price.
Lots of contrarians or simply wealthy people think increasing supply of housing does not cause this.
That hasn't been true for a decade but nobody updated their mental models
Great example in how humans do this thing called “hallucination” where they just make up facts. I wouldn’t trust them to write code.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden was bashing Trump for crashing the economy. An economy, Wyden said (paraphrasing) idolized by the world.
Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
Takes $600k/yr now to have buying power of $200k/yr in the 1980s. Inflation in the US has been here for decades hidden as deflation of purchasing power.
Median real wages are up since the 80s by quite a bit:
> Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most.
Yet Democrats are the useful idiots. Incredible.
> Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs
Tariffs incentivize domestic production. See the case of chicken tax and pickup trucks. While we do pay for tariffs now, later down the road we should not as more things would be made domestically. If you don’t do tariffs, there is no way to force producers to onshore.
> Tariffs incentivize domestic production
Stable, long term tariffs. We’re seeing historic falls in manufacturing employment for a reason.
> Stable, long term tariffs.
Well, you have to start somewhere.
> We’re seeing historic falls in manufacturing employment for a reason.
In your opinion, what is this reason?
> you have to start somewhere
There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
> what is this reason?
I’m remodelling my deck. I had orders into a steel mill in Utah. Tariffs mean their steel inputs are pricer than competitors in Vietnam. So I switched the order. And I paid with a cheque—if I paid cash I could skip taxes altogether. That wasn’t a thing six months ago.
Meanwhile, software and services aren’t tariffed. Just goods. Guess whose cost of capital has sunk.
> There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
You absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one. Will it apply for all categories of products? Probably not. However, it will definitely apply for many.
I am not sure I understood your reply about the reasons.
> absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one
If someone bet on e.g. our Japan tariffs three months ago, they lost money. (Nobody did. The types that take Trump at his word on tariffs aren’t making economically significant decisions.)
I do not know why anyone would bet that the executive order defined tariffs would stay. It was and still clear as a day that Trump uses them to force people to the negotiation table. Obviously, negotiated deal may look different.
Regardless, tariffs as an instrument have their merit with Trump or without Trump. Strategically, US has to bring manufacturing (and as much of a supply chains) back, there is no way around it.
> do not know why anyone would bet that the executive order defined tariffs would stay
If nobody bets on the tariffs staying then manufacturing doesn’t come back. The restoring of manufacturing is the bet.
> US has to bring manufacturing (and as much of a supply chains) back
Sure. These tariffs don’t do that.
> Sure. These tariffs don’t do that.
How do you know? Are you from the future?
> Are you from the future?
…we are currently in the future of the previous tariffs.
Also, come on, you’re yourself arguing these tariffs aren’t worth betting on. What do you think investing in a factory is?
>>Regardless, tariffs as an instrument have their merit with Trump or without Trump. Strategically, US has to bring manufacturing (and as much of a supply chains) back, there is no way around it.
Well no. Not really. Not for everything anyway. Some things like electronics - sure, but it's a matter of national security not economy - it doesn't have to make financial sense, it just has to exist so that the country can have that ability no matter what happens.
As a simple(and really oversimplified) example - let's say that tariffs force clothes manufacturers to bring tshirt making back to the States. The $5 T-Shirt now costs $30 due to tarrifs. So ok, someone makes a factory in US because now it makes sense, employs american workers, pays them good wage - ok, now they make t-shirts cost $20 because they are made domestically.
Cool - that's great, but now the rest of the world still buys $5 tshirts, while Americans buy $20 ones that can't even be exported anywhere because why would anyone buy them if they have cheaper alternatives. All you've done is you increased the cost of your products to the american consumers.
Some can argue - ok, that doesn't matter, what matters is that manufacturing is now back in the states and american people have employment. And sure, there is merit to that argument - but it reminds me of how my own country used to work under communist rule, people would go "comrade party leader, people have no jobs", "ok, we'll build a factory here so you can have jobs".
Can the factory make anything that is actually worth making? Doesn't matter, what matters is that people got jobs and "manufacturing is happening here" - for an economy based on capitalist principles, that sounds like a disaster for US.
But hey, what do I know. Just an external observer.
> Well no. Not really. Not for everything anyway.
So, you and I are in agreement that for some things it makes sense, right? Both strategically, and economically.
The chicken tax encourages creative workarounds more than domestic production. Importing all the parts and putting them together in the US is production work, so fine. Importing chassis cab and putting a bed on in the US is silly, importing with seats discarded in the US is wasteful (Ford got dinged, but I don't think others did?)
Who's making small cargo vans domestically? Nobody. So they're all 25% more expensive, so you might as well buy a big cargo van when a small one would do.
Honestly, governments buy enough light trucks, that 'buy american' requirements would likely keep at least one company making them here.
Chicken tax was introduced earlier than all the “relaxation” of what is considered “American”. The definition of “made in USA” became more flexible for products to be considered domestic while de facto being made somewhere else, hurting domestic manufacturing.
So, it’s not that the tax doesn’t work, the issue is all the things around it that made it less effective.
Only sector targeted tariffs paired with long term investment and commitment do that.
Long term stable tariffs yes. But you can't pretend like trumps tariffs were not done in the worst way possible?
Trump uses wild % amounts as a negotiation tactic. Is it the best way to do it? I don’t know. You can’t argue though that it does force the other side to come quickly to negotiation table to talk about the deal. So, if the goal is to get the deal now, then it’s effective. If the goal is something else, then it’s not a good tactic.
I do not have enough information to definitely say whether it’s good or bad. Most of the things in life are neither because they have good side effects, and bad side effects to them. So, I think looking for a “good only” solution is a loosing strategy.
When tariffs are imposed by the other side, they’re called “sanctions” and are considered one step short of declaring war. If they’re so great then they wouldn’t be used as punishment.
Economists pretty much universally agree that tariffs are bad for both sides. It can make sense to use them to preserve strategic industries even if it’s less efficient economically. For example, tariffs on food could make sense to ensure an enemy can’t starve you with a blockade. But as a blanket policy it’s just bad.
That particular outcome is possible when you make tariffs in a smart and predictable way. Trumps tariffs are unpredictable and also make local producers pay more for raw material they need.
> That particular outcome is possible when you make tariffs in a smart and predictable way.
You would have to prove that claim. There is more than one way to achieve a specific goal.
> Trumps tariffs are unpredictable and also make local producers pay more for raw material they need.
It’s one of the consequences. There are other ones. Is your only objective is to ensure that local manufacturers pay the least amount possible for their raw materials? This is very simplistic view of things.
> Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires
There were no tax cuts for billionaires in the BBB.
(Not increasing the tax is not a "cut".)
It absolutely is when the status quo would have increased taxes. That may not be a cut of current taxes, but in the longer timeframe it is absolutely a tax cut.
Framing it as not increasing taxes being a cut is misleading.
It's just as disingenuous as scaling back a proposed budget increase and calling it a "cut".
The FTC wouldn't let businesses get away with such language, why should the government get a pass?
If a bill due at the end of the month is forgiven on the 25th, were expenses cut? What if the debt is forgiven on the 2nd of the next month?
I’d wager most people would consider those scenario cuts. However, in your framework, the verbiage is different despite a shared outcome.
Bills are not due in advance. The analogy is inapt.
The taxes were cut 8 years ago. There aren't further "cuts". Billionare tax rates have been the same for the last 8 years, and will continue at the same rate at least into next year.
Weren’t those cuts set to expire?
"people earning roughly less than $806 a week — slowed to an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in June, down from a peak of 7.5 per cent in late 2022"
With inflation dropping from 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.7% in June 2025, real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years. The Financial Times failure to mention this context makes me question their motives.
"The wage growth trend means the lowest paid are now more likely to find themselves among the 40 per cent of US workers whose salaries are not keeping pace with inflation…"
They do talk about inflation in the article.
This is probably cold comfort to a population looking at housing prices rising at 3.7% in 2025 per realtor.com.
It doesn't change the "Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth" premise of the article, I don't see any hidden motive needed to explain this.
> real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years
This is total crap [1][2].
Wage 'growth' after 2+ years of real wage decline (vs stagnation) is the coldest comfort to folks categorized as 'low earner'. Anyone ignoring that make me question their motives
Works if/when archive.today is blocked
No Javascript required
x=https://www.ft.com/content/cfb77a53-fef8-4382-b102-c217e0aa4b25
echo url=$x|curl -K/dev/stdin -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain" > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmWhy does this work for the FT site?
simply disabling JS seems to do it
Welcome to modern slavery. You wanted rights and strive for legal orgnization to improve your working conditions and pay? So we'll replace you with people that have no rights, have ruthless gangs supply and control them, and maybe, we will get you some handouts if you do not upset the new applecart.
> Pay for the top 25 per cent of workers is up by 4.7 per cent in the year to June
Wait what? Anyone here getting 4.7% pay rises?
6% last year here.
Got an offer from a competitor, used it to negotiate a 20% raise.
Fairly certain the OP was talking about an annual "cost of living" adjustment, and not job searching for a better offer.
Fairly certain the quoted statistic was talking about total results, not people who stayed at the same job.
> The president wants his own people there so that, when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable
He wants people there to be his version of Minitrue, providing the numbers he wants to see, not the real ones:
Reporting unworkers doubleplusun-good, rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
Alternatively, he wants someone at the top who will create an organization that does not have to repeatedly restate massively incorrect numbers.
Such an organization cannot exist. These agencies are always balancing two opposing forces, timeliness and accuracy. Data collection is inherently delayed (e.g. a lot of it is from surveys that businesses complete at their own speed, or from reports that each state/agency submits on their own timeline.) So collection for a given quarter typically completes long after the quarter is over, and then it takes some time to crunch those numbers.
So if you want early data it will inherently be of limited accuracy because that involves a lot of extrapolation with whatever incomplete data has been collected by that time. If you want accurate data you will have to wait for it because that data takes longer to be collected. You do want both because you need to make timely decisions, since most times the early numbers don't get revised by much, but you also want to course-correct when later, better data gives a different signal.
Agencies like the BLS publish their methodologies in great detail. Big revisions have always been happening, only they are getting more attention these days because of the heavy politicization.
They shouldn’t announce until it’s accurate then?
That's where the timeliness versus accuracy trade-off comes in. There is significant value in having an early signal to act on, especially as long as there is awareness of its limitations. And as I mentioned, this data does come with very clearly documented caveats and methodologies so that users can make informed decisions.
Normally they're accurate enough, and the revisions/refinements are small.
The initial estimates haven't been accurate recently, because many workers have been completely dropping out of the economy because they're afraid of immigration raids. Information about these workers is just harder to gather and takes longer to verify.
Actually the major complaint was from last year when Biden was president (I'm not sure about this year). Every month, prior months were adjusted downward, often 100,000's thousands and wiping out the previous months positive figure.
Unless they are accurate most of the time, I would agree with this.
How massively incorrect are the numbers in comparison to previous years? Was it anything unusual?
Here, take a look for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024
If this is an understood part of the process, why is it such a problem now?
Name some organizations that have "fire employees until we get success". Does that create a culture that prizes success, or just encourage employees to hide failure?
The numbers get better as they get more data.
Why not wait to release them until enough data has come in that it's settled? Serious question, what's the downside?
Because the market values the early results and has an adult understanding of what the numbers mean.
Because the law requires them to release reports on certain dates, so they do so and then make corrections as more data comes in.
Thanks.
I think you understand how labor statistics work about as well as Trump.
Or rather not mention them at all. He'd rather not bring attention to the topic to begin with.
the min wage is long overdue, its should be somewhere near $25/hr this is how you 'tax' billionaires
That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
McDonalds were going to do that anyway.
And what's the point of a minimum wage of it doesn't provide a living? That's just letting private enterprise piggyback off the welfare system.
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
Why not?
I know several people supporting families on minimum wage.
Do they not deserve to be paid more?
> Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
This is false and not at all the reason why the minimum wage exists. It was created to bust sweatshops. You are making the same argument as the people that were defending sweatshops. It may be the argument proponents make now to argue against raising it, but it was not why it was created. Roosevelt literally said that the intent was that any business unable to provide a basic living wage for their workers was one that should not exist.
I may make a similar argument, but you go too far sir to imply I am aligned with evil people defending sweatshops.
I agree with Roosevelt that businesses should provide a living wage for their workers. Mine does.
I'm happy to have both: "minimum single-income with extended-family obligations wage" and "young, single individual minimum wage".
You just won't find a lot of the former.
Pure japes.
Ordering kiosks mean we can meet volume because more time is spent in production. Same with mobile ordering.
The employee count doesn't need to change up or down.
I got my first job as a grocer in 2010 which paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr. That was 15 years ago and the minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days? Might want to check what the grocery store you worked at in 2010 is really paying these days. I’d bet good money it’s significantly more than $7.25/hour.
Why?
Pretty sure the data of the past few years has shown we don’t really need a minimum wage apart from ensuring people aren’t absolutely taken advantage of. Nobody is paying just minimum wage anymore, apart from servers and the like that make most of their income from tips. The local McDonalds pays at least 50% more, for instance.
According to the WSJ, the California minimum wage increase for fast food workers reduced the number of those jobs by 20,000.
This is how you tax small business owners. The vast majority of businesses are not owned by billionaires
Perhaps if we taxed the billionaires more we could subsidize increased wages for small business owners or even do something actually good like provide universal basic income so that they cannot be so easily exploited for wildly undervalued labor
The value of labor is what people are willing to pay for it.
... what people are willing to pay for it... when the corporations already achieved regulatory capture and can force a partly state subsidized work force to take shit underpaid jobs. It's like a handout to corporations.
Deliberately underpaying people and then telling them their work has low value is one of the most disgusting aspects of capitalists. There's lots of CEOs who are not especially productive, they just have leverage.
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
> but so far has failed 100% of the time
Labor rights have been a raging success. 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage, sick leave, vacation leave (in non-shithole countries).
>BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to.
What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion? Free market is a free market only when there is competition based on the product, not how rich your investors are.
There is evidence the workers are being exploited everywhere if you bother to spend a second looking. Like the parent said, your apologism of capitalists is disgusting.
> Labor rights have been a raging success
so much success that now you need two working adults to support a family of 4 while 60 years ago a working man could support a much larger family with a single income.
> What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion?
Funny you should ask. There was a famous case from the beginning of the last century where German bromide producers price-dumped it the U.S. in an effort to undermine Dow's efforts in the same direction. The result? They failed miserably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company
> your apologism of capitalists is disgusting
Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.
If you find that disgusting - I am guessing you are a big fan of poverty. I would prefer a world in which everyone is rather rich (or at least well off), a world that no system other than capitalism is even close to providing.
> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again.
How come nobody practices it, then? In fact, right now the world's biggest economy is doubling down on trade restrictions.
You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
Is the answer a good one? https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
yeah, actually. If the worst thing you can find when paying living wages for workers is a small drop of 2.7% employment among fast food chains, that sounds like a great trade off.
Seriously, do some introspection here.
Why not $250/hr? Or $2,500/hr?
the eternal question people avoid. there is no "fair wage" definition.
There is just no advantage to being poor in America.
Why should there be an advantage to being poor?
Presumably you might want to give the poor a systemic advantage over the rich in order to balance the system and make it more democratic. Otherwise the rich will have more influence.
...because if there isn't then your democracy will turn into an oligarchy. The advantage needs to be somewhat against the richest and for the poorest if you're going to protect that.