Minimum wage workers can't afford a 1 bedroom apartment or studio where I live.
If someone makes the absolute legal minimum, why does every expect them to live alone?
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.
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.
In your case, you probably made the choice of your living arrangement, not a choice your employer made for you. That's different.
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.
Having roommates is fine and not a big deal.
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.
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.
...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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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"?