So perhaps they should split a 2/3 bedroom with roommates?

If someone makes the absolute legal minimum, why does every expect them to live alone?

This isn't something that is common in all areas if you are over a certain age - namely, when other folks start having children or living with romantic interests. Seriously. Especially in a small town. And it doesn't work if you don't have friends that are in a similar situation.

The more prudent thing is to make sure that the single person can afford a one-bedroom apartment. Unfortunately, these are often not much cheaper than a two bedroom. Where I lived in the states, a studio wasn't much cheaper either, mostly because they were all in apartment complexes instead of divided up houses.

Or maybe we can actually pay people a wage allowing them to lead some semblance of a decent life? Why does it fall on them, instead of the actual businesses paying them?

Are you asking why it falls on individual people to sort out their own lives and arrange their accommodations to their own liking?

Maybe because we prefer to grant individuals some degree of personal autonomy instead of making them dependent wards of whatever place they happen to work?

A business has the job of running itself in a profitable manner. Not babysitting what should be functional adults.

I share a house with three other people and I don't have any kids. I quite enjoy my life right now and if I had thinner skin I might take offense from your implication.

I'm saying that if people are not able to have a certain standard of living due to their income, why should it be framed as their fault? Obviously I'm not saying someone should be able to live in a 3000 sq. ft. house when I say "certain standard of living."

In your case, you probably made the choice of your living arrangement, not a choice your employer made for you. That's different.

> we can actually pay people

We should implement a UBI - minimum wage is not an effective method for decreasing poverty long term. Raising the minimum wage decreases demand for labor. A high minimum wage is only currently useful because of the other failures in our social safety net.

> some semblance of a decent life

Having roommates is fine and not a big deal.

Maybe not for you. For the 37-year-old average retail worker, who might have kids and might not have many other skills, maybe not so much. Not everyone is like you. In particular, many people in the demographic we're talking about might not be like anyone you've ever spent any time with.

I'm aware not everyone is like me. And also not everyone is a "37-year-old retail worker". If you want to dismiss my comment, that's fine, but you should delete your own to avoid hypocrisy.

> I'm aware not everyone is like me.

You are now. Didn't seem to be previously.

> you should delete your own to avoid hypocrisy.

I wasn't the one over-generalizing from personal experience. I didn't say "it's no big deal" as though that would be true for everyone. There's no hypocrisy, so spare us all the whataboutism.

I was plenty aware before. I was sharing my personal experiences. Someone who is a 37year old retail worker is free to share theirs as well. It appears like you are a bad actor and will dismiss anything that violates your 'reality'.

So interpreting your over-general statement exactly as written makes someone a bad actor? If you want to share personal experience, identify it as such ("for me") instead of expressing it as a general rule. If you want to provide a counterexample to an overly general statement, use words like "might" (as I did) to indicate that. Don't gaslight readers about what you originally said, and don't attribute evil motives to anyone who points it out. Those Reddit-level tricks will only convince anyone reading the exchange that you're the one arguing in bad faith.

With kids, though?

If you're working a minimum wage job, maybe don't have kids?

So, if you had kids while you had a decent job and the place closes, you should give away the kids because your replacement job is minimum wage? Is it the same if you wind up disabled and suddenly become a low earner?

Or, I know, celibacy for everyone and hope you don't get raped? Free abortions when birth control fails, if you can afford birth control and aren't unlucky enough to have issues with it?

Do you happen to know the income level when kids are affordable? Is this well above the average wage in the area (or in general)? Is this higher or lower than low-level military salary? Knowing this sort of number would really help folks out.

> So, if you had kids while you had a decent job and the place closes, you should give away the kids because your replacement job is minimum wage?

suddenly becoming unable to provide for your kids through no fault of your own is quite different from deciding to have children when you know (or should know) you already have no ability to support them. in both cases, we need to at least do something to help the children, but we have to structure it carefully to avoid encouraging the latter.

> Do you happen to know the income level when kids are affordable?

no, but I can look at what I spend to sustain myself every month. if I can't comfortably double that, I'm probably not ready to have my first child.

> I can look at what I spend to sustain myself every month

...and in doing so you make certain assumptions which might not be true for others. Like that your circumstances can only get better, never worse. The GP specifically asked about the latter, in the form of job loss. What if you decided that you were ready to have that child, quite reasonably acccording to those assumptions, and then those assumptions turned out to be incorrect. Would you blame yourself the way you seem to be blaming others?

I wasn't very clear. if you make a reasonable effort to plan ahead and something totally unforseen causes you to be unable to support your children, that really sucks and I would be happy to contribute tax dollars to help people in this situation. I don't think minimum wage is the best way to solve this though; probably direct aid would be more suitable.

also, my heuristic is meant to be more like a bloom filter. you can't know for sure when you are ready to support a small human for the next eighteen years, but it's not hard to tell when you are definitely not ready. making barely enough to support your single self is a pretty strong signal.

That seems much more reasonable. Thank you for clarifying.

I don’t think that would ever function. Poor people ARE going to have children too, even if you could argue that they can’t provide well enough for the kids. Are there any countries in the world where poor people don’t have children? Personally - even though having children is no right - I much rather live in a society where it is possible to have children even if you have a very low income. Like you can in my country (Sweden). We still have a well functioning market economy.

Why do you think a company should be allowed to not pay a livable wage?

> a livable wage

If someone can live in a 2/3 BR with roommates, that sounds pretty livable to me.

I used to live in a house with 6 other people during college. I lived just fine.

This is kind of a tone-deaf comment, don't you think? It manages to highlight its posters success (went to college, left), humble brag about how frugal & uncomfortable the poster situation once was (lived with 6 roommates), and dismiss other experiences (I was just fine) in two sentences.

The common definition of a livable wage is enough income to "secure food, shelter, clothing, health care, transportation and other necessities of living in modern society"[1]. If you _need_ to procure the assistance of others to live, you're not making a livable wage. So if you need food stamps for food, you're not making a livable wage. The same is true for housing. If you _need_ to live with roommates because you cannot afford even a studio on your own, you're not making a livable wage.

Sure, you were just fine during your stint co-habitating with near-strangers. But we're not talking about temporary inconveniences. We're talking about an alternate situation where you had failed to launch and 10 years later, are still stuck with random roommates, still grinding the same shitty jobs, still trying to save but failing because the most you can pack away is $50/mo, and there's always something that needs to be fixed or bought that takes those savings up. We're talking about how public policy should be able to help you help yourself.

There is nothing remotely livable about $290/week (federal minimum), just in case you may have forgotten how small that number is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage

Thank you. What people are willing to tolerate for a few years in college might be quite different than what they can tolerate as a permanent condition later in life. It might not even be possible to find dependable roommates once one moves a couple of miles away from the nearest college full of similarly situated students. Then there are schedule mismatches. Roommates partying until all hours every night is a little less welcome when you can't join in because you regularly work a 7am shift. There's the lack of an option to go back "home" (i.e. parents' house) for a break, or to store extra junk there, or borrow stuff from there. There's cooking real food due to lack of college meal plans or spare funds to eat out all the time. And then there's kids. I know not all college students enjoy these benefits, but for those who did to blithely say "I did it in college" is just unspeakably callow.

It seems like you are trying to dismiss my comment based on silly ideas and projection. Overall, your comment is incredibly ignorant and offensive.

> It manages to highlight its posters success

I did not intend to do that, I was clearly just providing context to my situation.

> humble brag

I don't see how I was bragging.

> how frugal & uncomfortable the poster situation once was

I never stated I was uncomfortable; I was perfectly comfortable. Of course it was more frugal than living alone; that's the entire point of this conversation.

> and dismiss other experiences

I wasn't dismissing other experiences, I was sharing my own.

> If you _need_ to live with roommates because you cannot afford even a studio on your own, you're not making a livable wage.

I absolutely disagree with that definition. A roommate is not "assistance".

> There is nothing remotely livable about $290/week (federal minimum)

State and local minimums are far higher. Areas that do not have a local minimum wage are often magnitudes cheaper and are more affordable than areas with higher cost of livings and higher wages.

because people will always consider a "living wage" to be 1.5-3x whatever the current minimum is.

I'm confused, are you saying that the tendency for people to want more means we should never re-assess what is considered enough? I hope I got it wrong -- how would you ever improve anything in your life if you live by that rule?

I'm mainly objecting to the term "living wage". people who use it are usually unwilling to commit to a specific set of things that a "living wage" should pay for, but are perfectly happy to exploit the term as a rhetorical technique to smear anyone who slightly pushes back on them.

if by "living wage" you mean "able to afford food and shelter", I'm 100% with you; any full-time job should support that. if you bump it up to a modest studio/1br, I'm still with you. but somewhere along the path to "a living wage is enough to rent a 2br+ dwelling, support a stay at home spouse, arbitrarily many children, and have some left over for eating out and putting away in savings" is where you've lost me.

Awesome, sounds like you're on board with the common definition of Living Wage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage): "secure food, shelter, clothing, health care, transportation and other necessities of living in modern society".

no I don't think I am. from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:

> The goal of a living wage is to allow a worker to afford a basic but decent standard of living. Due to the flexible nature of the term "needs", there is not one universally accepted measure of what a living wage is and as such it varies by location and household type.

this is what I'm saying. who knows what I'm committing to if I say I support a "living wage"?