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Living a decent life alone in America. The costs go up if you want a family.
In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
The minimum wage should be $96,000 right now.
Doesn’t the picture next to it show the cost for a family?
Redefine family as two (or more) partners and their pets. Ezpz
Right, but the headline is incomplete.
The national average is dragged upwards by cities like NYC, and San Francisco. You can live for much less money in thousands of places across the USA. That said, the cost of living has skyrocketed over the last 4 years by an insane amount. Our inflation index is being manipulated and doesn’t accurately reflect how much real prices have increased. We’ve all seen dozens of products that are more than double the price from a few years ago. But if you point this out, the data heads will call it vibeflation and claim it’s not real.
Agreed, it would be more accurate to show the median because of these outliers
Define comfort.
Looks like these numbers came from a report by SmartAsset, which took it’s numbers from the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Here’s a link to their methodology:
https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
Relevant definitions:
At its simplest, a living wage is what one full-time worker must earn on an hourly basis to help cover the cost of their family’s minimum basic needs where they live while still being self-sufficient.
There are eight basic needs – food, childcare, health care, housing, transportation, civic engagement, broadband, and other necessities – that make up the cost components of the living wage, with an additional cost associated with income and payroll taxes.
EDIT: It looks like the SmartAsset report used their 50/30/20 rule to estimate their “comfortable” living wage. 50% needs, 30% wants, and 20% paying down debts. The MIT calculator bundles some needs and wants together, so it appears that SmartAsset teased out the expenses they categorize as “needs,” e.g., food, housing, and transportation, and then they doubled it.
You can eat and sleep inside (something)
As long as that thing isn’t a car!
Well…. Thats extra.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comfort
You might want to get a device that connects to the interwebs and has a ‘searching engine.’ I’ve been using AskJeeves for years and haven’t had a problem yet.
Thanks for giving me the true Reddit experience even over here.
Ask a Reddit question, get a Reddit answer.
Here’s an actual article on FDR and the minimum wage. Decent place to start your research.
https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/blog/posts/what-did-fdr-mean-by-a-living-wage.htm
Welcome to Lemmy. This type of shit is common.
And just like in Reddit it’s easy to not engage with someone who clearly feels superior 😃
No need to be a dink
I still remember six figures being the key to posterity. And now you may still starve.
How so? The graphic indicates you’ll live comfortably with that income, not starve.
I’m in the family bucket on the right.
Get out of the bucket
By eating them. Out of the bucket and full tummy.
Close, the eating part is right, but the people to eat is not your family.
We hit a point where it was a nice landmark and then when the moment passed we all got locked in on it. It’s not as fun to say the modern equivalent is some messy number far above it so we just got stuck instead.
235,000??? What the fuck that’s impossible for the VAST majority of families with kids. $96k is impossible for many adults, if not most. Goddamn
The crux of this issue, why everyone has something to say about it: is because the word ‘comfortably’ seems open to interpretation. But it’s defined in a way that makes sense here.
For the purposes of the referenced study https://smartasset.com/data-studies/salary-needed-live-comfortably-2024, they used the MIT Living Wage Calculator https://livingwage.mit.edu/ and extrapolated out total compensation needed to maintain the 50/30/20 rule, where 50% of your total income goes to necessities, 30% to entertainment and wants, and 20% to investments or debt payments.
So it’s really not up for debate unless you’d like to argue against the figures presented in the MIT Living Wage calculator or the 50/30/20 ‘rule’.
Agree they list the rule - but like a mean vs median thing, are crazy cities like NYC or LA skewing the average?
We make about half the bottom-right picture, but I AM at about the 50/30/20 balance. Yes, worthless anecdote, but still makes $240k seem a tad high for a median.
I’ll have to take a look at my spending and see where my splits really are. To the spreadsheet!
It does seem to feature estimates regarding the average rather than median, so you’re right. Higher CoL areas would drive that way up.
Plus, upon further review, I realized the study only involved the top 100 most populated cities. That would for sure skew the number upward as well.
im like at least 3% sure the subtext is 503020 does not reflect the reality of if you can manage 100, closer to the actual median around 45k, then ==> follows some version of that is enough.,.
It is worth mentioning that everything discussed so far was in terms of averages, not medians. The average salary is more like 58k.
A bit misleading picture. So one adult is 96k, and a family of 4 is 235k. 2 adults would be around the 160k I guess, since they hare rent/mortgage. 2 children then cost around 75k.
Still, 96k for one adult? Seems high. They must factor in the highest rent and most expensive (middle class) car and vacations.
What is the source?
Yeah, their definition of “comfort” seems to be a solidly middle class experience of going to Disney world and…other middle class stuff? I live alone in nyc and I’m plenty comfortable, but I’m not making 140k.
How much are you saving for retirement?
What retirement?
Going to Disney World is middle class? Pretty sure that taking lavish annual vacations has always been an upper class activity.
No, going to Disney world and taking yearly vacations used to be considered middle class. On one income, by the way. We’re just so beaten down these days that we consider basic life enjoyment and time off away from the house “upper class.” I’m old enough to tell you it wasn’t, and it hasn’t been this way very long.
I’m middle-aged and I don’t know any middle class families that took annual vacations when I was younger. My upper middle class and upper class friends did though. How long ago are you talking here? In the 50’s?
Two cohabiting adults get some economy of scale benefit, but then children add the entire childcare category to the expenses. Housing and Transportation costs, the largest fraction of the budget, both see only marginal increases with each additional family member.
All costs took the average for the region or metro area. It really does cost $96,000 on average to live in America.
The source is a SmartAsset report that pulled data from the MIT Living Wage calculator. It takes the average regional costs for housing, transportation, taxes, etc, and then SmartAsset used a 50/30/20 rule to estimate comfortable living wages from basic needs expenses.
nice, so if you and your partner both make 96k then yout children must only make 21.5k each.
Are you fucking me? Tell me that is overestimate. I did not work my early life to get a good job just to be told it still not enough to live comfortably.
The word “comfortably” is doing a lot of work here. Obviously plenty of people raise a family on less.
So around 80$ an hour for a single person. Hope you’re trained in a specialized area of work. Maybe one day I can aspire to eventually become lower middle class.
You may want to check your math?
96k : $46/hr
Does that factor in taxes?
If they wanted an after Tax Number - they would’ve noted that.
yup. pretty much 100k in a city of any appreciable size at least.
$318k for a family in NYC HAS to be bullshit, surely? The median salary is $74k. Are that many people struggling, or is the definition of “living comfortably” a stretch?
=T every indication is that living comfortably is well beyond the means of most people, and personally, with the definition laid out and used in this article, many agree it is a good measure,… and most would agree that most (more than 50%) of people are living well below it.
Really needed the bathroom symbol imagery for maximum relatability for their target audience.
