Transcript
A tweet saying “100k a year to take someone’s order at Taco Bell <thumbs up emoji>. Totally makes sense.”. It has a reply saying “Where the hell did you get that number? If someone’s working enough hours to make that on $15 an hour, they deserve it. $15 an hour, a person working 40 a week makes $31,200 a year.” the reply has 2 likes.
Apparently
I think everyone should be paid a living wage, even if their job is bullshit.
I think that bullshit jobs are almost even more damaging to a person’s mental health and humanity than one that is physically taxing but not abusive.
I also hate the concept of a “living wage,” because it implies that only people who work deserve to live. I want to see everyone supplied the means to live and for them to work for the things they want. Minimalists will be the new “billionaires.”
I think the solution is Universal Basic Income with benefits, paired with fixed income ranks. Everyone within a rank gets exactly the same pay each year. Each job class falls into a specific rank, determined by objectively developed ERK metrics - Effort, Risk, Knowledge. Wealth and assets is capped alongside income, so someone like Bezos, Musk, or Trump can’t have excessive wealth. In addition to this, I think that education should be treated as a paying job, rather than something that student pay for. A student forced to be a barista isn’t able to focus on mastering their intended specialty, which is bullshit.
IMO, money should be for upgrading lifestyle, not used for survival. This would allow people to freely strike or protest, since their income doesn’t dictate whether they get to eat or have a place to live.
While my concept is completely artificial, I would argue that the excessively wealthy distorts economic reality - so we might as well go with an deliberate distortion that serves everybody, rather than the few.
And that’s what the minimum wage was intended to be, a living wage no matter how bullshit your job is. FDR even wrote about it publicly, confirming that yes, even if you’re pumping gas, the intent was for you to be able to live well.
Instead, we chose to impoverish everyone so we can have 700 billionaires, and we can’t change it, because our government caters to those 700 billionaires and couldn’t care less about the working class and poor.