Contrary to the media depiction in your country, the United States is a bit bigger than New York and California, and many of those mysterious places in between are pretty affordable.

Doesn't change the fact that the US' minimum wage is incredibly low and has been for years.

That wasn't the original claim, and anyway I'm skeptical. Certainly the US minimum wage is very high if we look at it naively (in most of the world $13.50/hr is a whole lot of money, especially considering the significantly improved worker protections). You'd need to account for purchasing power and cost of living, and I don't have the data handy.

But it hardly matters, we can campaign for a higher minimum wage without arguing that the US is a terrible place. And I'll go a bit further--not only is the wild hyperbole unnecessary, it's actively harmful to the campaign for a higher minimum wage because people associate the issue with liars.

> That wasn't the original claim

The original claim was that the US needed a higher minimum wage.

> $13.50/hr

Where is this number from? The US federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr, unchanged since 2009. The only states with numbers like you've quoted are the ones you're also telling people to look beyond.

> arguing that the US is a terrible place

Neither I, you, nor nacho2sweet are saying that so I'm not sure why you're bringing that into this.

They would be affordable if they had jobs.

Well, it is Montana, it includes medical and dental insurance at 100% employee and 75% for dependents. The total comp is probably more comparable to other $22-25/hr jobs with minimal benefits for someone with a family.

You can live on that just fine in many rural areas, where a lot of welding jobs might be found.

Bum pay and racist coworkers are as American as baseball and apple pie!

Surely you're aware that the median wage in the United States is higher and racism lower than virtually anywhere else in the world, right?

Tens of millions of people in the United States live below the median wage, by definition. It's a nonsense statistic in the context of a remark on any particular low-paying job, of which there seem to be plenty on this site.

I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.

> Tens of millions of people in the United States live below the median wage, by definition.

Right, but that's precisely the point--the same is true everywhere ("median" doesn't work differently when applied to Europe or Asia! (: ).

> It's a nonsense statistic in the context of a remark on any particular low-paying job, of which there seem to be plenty on this site.

You remarked that low paying jobs were quintessentially American. If that's the case, we would expect some majority of Americans to hold low-paying jobs when in fact the median American pay is quite high relative to other regions of the world.

> I don't know you (or anyone else) would evaluate racism being "lower" in the US. It also occurs to me that lower isn't the same thing as low, and that I don't have to fix other exceptionally racist countries before I remark about racism in my own.

I think you're being unduly defensive here. No one is saying you have to fix any other place before remarking about racism in your own country. I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.

> You remarked that low paying jobs were quintessentially American. If that's the case, we would expect some majority of Americans to hold low-paying jobs when in fact the median American pay is quite high relative to other regions of the world.

A country can be both profoundly wealthy on paper and have a massive indigent population. Statistics like median income don't account for the extraordinary individual debt, poor average healthcare outcomes, or the absence of basic social safety nets that Americans accept without blinking. Compare us to our development cohort on median wage alone and we look normal, but the median American goes home each day with more debt and fewer guardrails against poverty than nearly every other median citizen in the developed world.

> I am saying that your heavy implication that the US has unusually high levels of racism seems factually incorrect. By all means, we can criticize our country, but let's strive to be factual.

I'm not going to claim to know every developed country's constitution or founding documents, but I'm pretty sure most don't have a 3/5ths clause the way that ours does. The US is a deeply racist country, down to our founding principles. It might not look like the kind of racism that passes for normal in other countries, but it's a category error to conflate that difference in kind with a difference in severity or deep-rootedness.