First, no one is bragging they can or want to live on $7.25/hr, that’s a strawman. But the idea that people are actually working full-time at $7.25 is a bigger fantasy than this reality show idea. Workers earning the federal min wage are unicorns, here’s the data:
▪️Out of 76.1M workers who are paid at hourly rates, just 0.2% earn the Federal min wage of $7.25/hr. Only 0.1%, just 58K out of 76M hourly workers, are full-time. If you count all workers, only 0.04% work full-time at $7.25. They just don’t exist.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2021/home.htm
▪️There are a measurable amount (1.2% of hourly-paid workers) who earn below the fed min wage. Sometimes you’ll hear “at or below min wage” to describe them. But the min wage already doesn’t apply to these workers, so who are they?
▪️Some are intern-type jobs, but the vast majority, according to the BLS, are service jobs, leisure and hospitality in particular. And as the BLS admits, “For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received.”
▪️Thus, the tiny fraction of workers who earn at or below the min wage are workers earning tips, which is why they accept such a low hourly rate. After all, even the lowest fast food jobs now pay much higher than $7.25.
▪️In fact, American workers now avg $33.03/hr, even production and nonsupervisory workers avg $28.26/hr. The lowest paid sectors are retail trade ($20.19/hr) and leisure & hospitality ($18.21/hr.) No one is working for $7.25, let alone a hard working full-timer.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t24.htm
▪️The positive thing about not raising the fed min wage for so long is we can see that it has no effect on raising the bar. In fact, the opposite. Unemployment continues to fall, while wages rise, albeit dampened by inflation (though the lowest paid jobs are keeping up with inflation).
▪️The narrative that, without the min wage employers would pay slave wages, is obviously not the case. And the longer it’s not raised the weaker the argument is for it. Which the left hates, so they continue to harp on fantasies about the unicorn workers making $7.25/hr.
▪️This is a proposal that pertains only to graduate level nursing degrees, not undergraduate ones (which were never considered professional degrees). The proposal will have a 30-60 day public comment period next year, where groups can object, before the DoE will decide on it.
▪️This is about how much federal student loans someone can take out for a particular degree. The cap on graduate degrees is $100k ($20,500/yr), while a “professional degree” limit is $200k ($50k/yr).
▪️Under the new rule proposal, professional degrees include:
🔹Pharmacy
🔹Dentistry
🔹Veterinary medicine
🔹Chiropractic
🔹Law
🔹Medicine (including osteopathic medicine & podiatry)
🔹Optometry
🔹Theology
▪️The nursing degrees excluded are ones like master of science in nursing (MSN), doctor of nursing practice (DNP) and PhD in nursing. These degrees would be limited to $100k in federal student loans, like all other graduate degrees.
▪️These changes came from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s...
▪️The left keeps using this meme but they don’t actually believe it. If you believe SNAP subsidizes companies to pay below a “living wage” this implies that if you take food stamps away they would suddenly pay a higher, “living” wage. So why not get rid of food stamps, then?!
▪️Except they know, and everyone knows, this isn’t true. Wages are set by supply and demand, not some mythical “living wage” metric. Absent food stamps there would actually be downward, not upward, pressure on wages, because the reality is food stamps subsidize the poor to not work as much as they might otherwise need to.
▪️Without SNAP, some low income people would need to work more hours to make ends meet, increasing the availability of low-skilled labor and lowering wages (all else being equal).
▪️Plus, we all know the left loves and supports food stamps. Which means, by this meme’s logic, they love to subsidize corporate profits. But they don’t really, they just think this ...
▪️Wait, this is the guy libertarians and the new right rave about being a great historian?! This sounds like a clueless meme from The Other 98%, except they wouldn’t add in the bizarre defense of feudal lords. Feudalism didn’t deprive peasants of their livelihoods for abstract goals? This is total fantasy.
▪️Amazon employs 1.55M, so this is less than 2% of their workforce, although these cuts will be to corporate, which employs 350k, so 8.5% of that. The CEO says there is an excess of bureaucracy at Amazon, and AI can automate certain repetitive tasks. Also, much of the cuts will be to HR, which is expected shrink by 15%, yay. Managers and HR are peasants now?
▪️I don’t know the inner workings of Amazon, and neither does Darryl, but this seems to be normal management practice to keep a company efficient and competitive. Given the immense size of Amazon the numbers look large, but far bigger shakeups happen all the time in the private sector. Apparently, under the new ...
