Most fast food workers in California would get a $20 minimum wage next year — a nearly $5 per hour raise — under a deal announced Monday between labor unions and the industry that will avoid a costly referendum on the November 2024 ballot.
When you raise wages the market can bear more. Say you’re paying $1,000 a month and have just enough left over for necessities. You get a raise for $200 a month, now the landlady can raise rent $200 and you’re left exactly the way you were before. She won’t figure this out right away of course, she’ll just keep playing with the rent until she hits a point where people are able to pay and she has a unit sitting vacant. Once that unit rents then she can start raising again
And the unit will rent as soon as someone–who previously couldn’t afford rent–gets a raise that makes them able to afford it. Soon the rent for everyone goes up, and now someone’s not able to afford it anymore and has to move out.
The end result is that one homeless person now has a home, one person who previously had a home is now homeless, everyone got shafted with higher rent, and everybody’s available spending money remains the same.
This is why nothing ever changes and the poor will always be poor: the system just designed to suck all excess cash out and put it in the pockets of the investors (landlords, banks, BlackRock, etc). The problem is not wages, because the market will always adjust to eat the wages. The system screws you because it was designed to screw you, and the people who have the ability to fix it don’t want to because they are the ones who benefit from it.
Even so, the problem is not capitalism, it’s our specific form of radically unregulated capitalism, combined with intentional inflation, fiat currency, and laws that favor corporations over people. No doubt that list could be made quite a bit longer!
I’m not willing to abandon capitalism but this version of it has become corrupted.
Yes…
When you raise wages the market can bear more. Say you’re paying $1,000 a month and have just enough left over for necessities. You get a raise for $200 a month, now the landlady can raise rent $200 and you’re left exactly the way you were before. She won’t figure this out right away of course, she’ll just keep playing with the rent until she hits a point where people are able to pay and she has a unit sitting vacant. Once that unit rents then she can start raising again
And the unit will rent as soon as someone–who previously couldn’t afford rent–gets a raise that makes them able to afford it. Soon the rent for everyone goes up, and now someone’s not able to afford it anymore and has to move out.
The end result is that one homeless person now has a home, one person who previously had a home is now homeless, everyone got shafted with higher rent, and everybody’s available spending money remains the same.
This is why nothing ever changes and the poor will always be poor: the system just designed to suck all excess cash out and put it in the pockets of the investors (landlords, banks, BlackRock, etc). The problem is not wages, because the market will always adjust to eat the wages. The system screws you because it was designed to screw you, and the people who have the ability to fix it don’t want to because they are the ones who benefit from it.
Even so, the problem is not capitalism, it’s our specific form of radically unregulated capitalism, combined with intentional inflation, fiat currency, and laws that favor corporations over people. No doubt that list could be made quite a bit longer!
I’m not willing to abandon capitalism but this version of it has become corrupted.