xantav wrote:
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If you are being honest about your situation, then it's not "fine and normal". But that's the point. Most people are able to improve their economic condition over the course of their lives. If you have not, it's not because the system is broken, but because you have made a set of choices (or I suppose been ridiculously unlucky, just to give you a possible benefit of the doubt) that have resulted in an extremely rare outcome for you personally. But again, that's not normal. Most people don't get stuck in low wage jobs their whole lives. I know that's a narrative folks like to talk about and attempt to push for political change over, but it's just not the typical American worker experience.
So you would blame people who may have made a single mistake?
Who said anything about blame? Why is this presented as all or nothing and if I don't take someone's side or support them, I'm "blaming them". Huh? Your outcomes are based primarily on your choices and actions. That's not about blame, it's about outcomes. There's nothing wrong with pointing out that if you want good outcomes you need to take actions that increase your odds of achieving those outcomes. You can twist that around into some kind of blame for those who *don't* take those choices/actions, but I think that's incredibly counterproductive.
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Maybe in your comfortable job you can't imagine it, but it is really easy to get trapped in a low wage situation.
Yes. Because it's easy to not take the actions that will help you avoid that situation. It's "hard" to make the right choices. But that's why you get rewarded for them. You can choose to think of this as some kind of punishment, but it's not. The natural state, if you do nothing, is for you to have nothing. Similarly, if you do very little, you will also have very little. If you want to get ahead in life, you need to work at doing so. It's not easy. That's kind of the point.
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1) Go to college out of school and end up with a massive amount of debt. Take whatever is available after graduation so you can make some progress towards paying back that loan, even if it means working fast food. Due to the ACA, you will be lucky to work 25 hours a week. So that means having to get a 2nd minimum wage job. Now, working 50 hours/week at 2 jobs is a lot different than 50 hours at a single job. Schedules rarely match up nicely so you have a very erratic schedule week to week, making it tough to find time to do any kind of serious job hunting.
Sure. So blame it on Obama then. Some of us warned that this would be a side effect of the ACA back when it was being proposed. Here's the thing though. Another component to this is the unfortunately high percentage of students graduating colleges with degrees that have little correlation to actual jobs in the market. Perhaps pursuing a "hard" engineering degree instead of an "easy" social sciences degree might have produced better rewards?
Can't remember which source I saw this on, but your odds of working in the "near minimum wage" range if you have completed a bachelors degree or higher drops to a very small percentage. If you can't get a job with a degree, that's because there aren't jobs looking for people with your skill set. I guess I still have to conclude that it's something those people are doing if the other 96% or so of college graduates all have managed to get decent paying jobs.
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2) Take whatever job you can get right out of high school, which will most likely be a minimum wage job. In order to get something better, you are told to get a college education. Good luck affording that on your current paycheck.
And? You do understand that there are routes to higher paying jobs that don't require college. They do, however, require expending effort to build up some skills in some area. Are you going to make a 6 figure salary that way? Probably not. Will you make enough to support yourself and maybe even a family? Probably. It might take you 10 years or more, but you will get there. Unless you just give up and sit in some dead end minimum wage job wallowing in pity.
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Either way, starting out in the work place today is a lot different than it was 20 years ago. Having connections is more important than ever, so if you don't have the social skills to have somebody hook you up with a job, welcome to a wonderful life of minimum wage employment.
Sigh. If you approach it that way, then that's what will happen.
Um... BTW, if you read the Heritage page I linked, it actually talked about this very problem, but it tied it to minimum wage being too high. When minimum wage is high, it reduces the number of low paying entry level jobs in the market. Which has the effect of cutting off the bottom rung of the economic ladder for many just starting out workers. The kinds of jobs that might actually lead to higher paying jobs just don't exist in sufficient numbers anymore because employers are required to pay more than they can afford for those skills. If minimum wage were lower, more employers would create jobs with that low pay scale for low skill labor. But over time, those laborers who spend the effort can improve their skills and then move into higher paying positions within those fields. Right now though, there's no point in hiring anyone who doesn't already have a degree or experience in the field if you have to pay a given rate anyway.
Which is what can make people "stuck" in minimum wage jobs. I'm not denying the possibility for this to happen, I'm questioning the concept that simply raising minimum wage will fix the problem. I'd argue that it will only make things worse.