cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/29825277
By popular demand, one last map to examine the absurdity of the American economy.
If you saw my map from yesterday that was up most of the day, please see the corrected version below. I done goofed hard on copying a column of state names. The original post has been corrected, but I will also post my previous two maps on this post for easy comparison.
Edit: the red map, for anyone unaware, is based on current individual state minimum wages and not the current federal minimum wage
How are you accounting for cities pulling up the averages for each state? For example New York has some dirt cheap places to live, but it’s clearly being dragged up by New York City.
You’d be surprised how few people live in NYC currently as compared to years before. It’s becoming a ghost town of the ultra wealthy and dwindling services and space for anyone else
It’s still considered to be the most populous city in the US at around 7.9 million.
Doesn’t look or feel that way when you walk it rn. So many closed businesses where there used to be busy streets
At first glance that top map already looked bad, but then I zoomed in on the legend and the cutoff for the white areas is an annual deficit of 60.000 … What a ridiculous scale, that entire map should be blood red.
Any rational perspective on current wealth inequality is naturally shocking
And people avoid shocking things
The only way to get traction is to kind of pretend things are halfway normal
The reasonable, rational people who are absolutely freaked out by the French Revolution levels of wealth inequality are marginalized and sidelined and told they are overreacting
FOR THREE FUCKING DECADES
Fathers with hungry children will be in the streets before the end of summer
I’m pretty sure the cost of living numbers are for a household, not an individual.
So unless we’re looking to get back to single income households, the min wage should be divided by two.
No, these are using the cost of living numbers for an individual. Cost of living for a family of four is over 2x higher by their same calculations.
So for two individuals making $35 an hour they would be close to affording comfortable cost of living in the cheapest state. Or it we were to make it equivalent to one individual’s income being enough for a family, they would need to be earning like 80 an hour
As I showed in my longer comment, this would make the modern minimum needed to afford average COL raising a family equivalent to a top tier income in 1958. Basically unless someone was a 1%er in 1958 they wouldnt be able to live comfortably today. That is how unsustainably far down our wages have stagnated. 47% of households make less than what it costs for one individual to live comfortably. The median income today might be at a roughly equivalent point when adjusting for inflation, but it is brutally low in comparison to what one can actually buy with what that same value of money bought someone in 1958
Well damn then.
That’s extra depressing.
