Can anyone actually live on $40 a day?

At least 80% of humans live on $10 per day or less.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

The parent meant in the area where Walmart etc are paying that wage.

Okay, then since the Walmart employees are still alive, the answer is yes. They can live on $40/day. As an added bonus, they have a higher standard of living than the vast majority of humans on the planet.

Well, no. If they could, they wouldn't be receiving assistance.

Walmart has turned, e.g., food assistance programs into a subsidy for themselves.

If you can imagine a world in which food assistance programs suddenly came to an end, would Wal-Mart raise its wages? Perhaps the workers would demand more. Either way, in the long run it's not possible for any employer to pay wages below the basic survival rate.

> Either way, in the long run it's not possible for any employer to pay wages below the basic survival rate.

Sure it is, if they are willing to accept more rapid turnover and the workers they are competing for have no better offers.

How long do you honestly believe an employer can sustain a business providing wages insufficient to purchase food to provide the calories necessary to complete the work?

You are attempting to recast the question to looking at median subsistence-rates worldwide. The Walmart workers we are discussing work in communities in the U.S.

Certainly, some folks in the world survive on $1/day. That doesn't work in the U.S.

We know that Walmart wages are insufficient alone, because workers there tell us that they need, for instance, SNAP to feed their kids.

Thus SNAP is, in part, now a subsidy to Walmart.

The point of this discussion is to shine a light on how ignorant the OP's question was. The original question was whether a person could live off $40/day. But that's not what OP really meant was it? What they meant to ask was whether or not a person could live OP's approximate standard of living on $40/day. And the answer to that is obviously not. If you make more than $34k/yr you're in the global 1%. Virtually no one on the planet lives at the OP's standard of living. The question only shows the OP's hubris.

SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase. Every dollar not spent on food is another dollar someone might collect in rent, or cell phone service, or clothing. Wal-Mart may benefit greatly from SNAP, but it benefits far more from its customers having more income that they don't have to spend on subsistence than it benefits from its employees being able to accept a lower wage. And of course Wal-Mart accepts SNAP payments from its customers because Wal-Mart sells groceries.

> SNAP is a subsidy for every industry that sells products that people on SNAP might purchase

You're missing my point. SNAP is a direct subsidy to Walmart not because they sell food, but because many of their workers cannot live where they live without being enrolled in SNAP due to the low pay.

SNAP subsidizes Walmart by supplementing workers' paychecks.

It sounds like you are suggesting that wages should be set at a minimum level that is strictly above any government assistance. So if you have a job, you are disqualified from any assistance what so ever, and all the government assistance should be focused on people without jobs, essentially to bring them to that minimum.

That's similar to what welfare was like before welfare reform in 96 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_...

I understand your point, I was just pointing you to a different perspective. Wal-Mart makes far more money from SNAP recipients as customers than it potentially saves in wages. I personally do not believe SNAP saves Wal-Mart any wages at all.

I'll circle back to the question I asked several levels ago. If SNAP suddenly disappeared, do you believe that would cause Wal-Mart to raise its wages? If not, then your point is moot since it's not saving Wal-Mart any wage costs.

That depends on how big the available labor force with no better offers is, and what the rate is at which people from outside that group move into it; potentially indefinitely, under the right (or very wrong, depending on your perspective) conditions.

I'd be interested in any examples you have.

Unpaid internships?

Well, you got me there so I gave you an upvote. Temporarily bartering labor for skills training is a complexity I hadn't accounted for.

Yeah, a rather extreme example, and of course we hope they are being sufficiently well compensated in experience, though we know that's not always the case.

As another example, there's the people working 70 hour weeks across 3 jobs - no one of those is paying what's necessary to sustain the employee.

Moreover, if you're okay with high turnover, there may be people willing to work for you unsustainably for a time just to lower their burn rate.

Is walmart not proof that the answer to your question is quite a long time?

No, and this is exactly the point I was trying to drive home when I made my original post about over 80% of the all humans living on less than $10/day. When the OP asked if "anyone can live on $40/day" what they really meant was, "Can people live a lifestyle reasonably close to mine on $40/day." The answer to that is obviously not. The question is being asked by someone who is almost certainly in the top 1% of incomes across the globe (which is about $34k/yr). But the real answer is that a person can live incredibly well by global standards on $40/day.

Irrelevant without context.

I was intentionally providing context.

Certainly in a place like Boise, ID. That's $800/month, $704 after tax. Rent with roommates will run around $300/month. Food is $150/month ($5/day). That leaves $250/month for misc expenditures. It would absolutely be tight, but people can and do live on that much.

Hope you never get sick and have to call in, your car never breaks down, and you never have a medical emergency!

If you get seriously sick 3X (5 time even) that amount won't save you. But as things stand now you'd have free(ish) healthcare anyway.

Car? What car? You are walking, biking, riding the bus.

It's doable, barely, just barely and there will be troubles if anything comes up.

Would that qualify as life or merely survival? Can a person under these conditions become a parent? Can someone in this situation raise a healthy kid?

I doubt it.

No, you can't have a kid on this money. Nor is it a very good life in terms of material possessions. You probably can't afford a horse either.

But none of those things were specified in OP's post.

That's more or less what it meant - a meaningful, healthy life, above merely survival. I would know - I'm the OP.

Ah yes, indeed you are. I had to go further up the tree it appears.

I don't disagree. Not a good life.

People live on a buck here and there and change they find in vending machines as far as a "living" goes. Technically they are "alive" but it can't be nice way to live.

Kind of makes one wonder exactly what level of "living" is acceptable. I suppose preferences vary.

What if you have a family?

It raises some interesting questions. Should every job pay a sufficient wage to raise a family? How big of a family? Should we require employers to pay a teenager as much as someone supporting a family of 8?

Food goes up a little bit, and your room is more crowded. Everything else is the same.

Go look at the size of a log cabin, they were about the size of a single bedroom today and large families lived in them.

> [if you have a family] Food goes up a little bit, and your room is more crowded. Everything else is the same.

The amount of money and extra time that we spent on just one baby was astounding - clothes, doctor visits, food. Many more trips to the store/pharmacy/doctor, etc, than normal.

The USDA's child cost estimator [0] says that raising a child in the midwest costs about an extra $12000 a year, on average. Not all of that breakdown may apply, but even if you were to ONLY look at food costs, an extra $1500/year in food (when you're only making the hypothetical $800/month discussed in the GP) is not "a little".

0: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/tools/crc_calculator/

My wife is great at scrounging: kids didn't add much to my costs unless we are eating out. You can get last years styles all over for cheap. My kids can have a few stains - they will be putting their own on anyway.

Hopefully you have a second wage earner in it.

The poster's point is that $19.20 is significantly above the federal minimum wage and what Walmart is legally required to pay.

I want to emphasize in this context (gig delivery) that the recent UberEats Stockholm posting indicated even less than $5/hr.

Yes. Most people want a higher standard of living, but if you live in a small enough apartment, walk everywhere, cook your own meals, have only minimal utilities (your furnace exists for the pipes not for your comfort)... it can be done.

Distribution center is different than in store associates.