> 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"?