The meme of a living wage is a nice one. It hits most moral frameworks as fair. The concern I have with it is it isn't defined.

What does living mean? When I belonged to a high demand religion that is known for "helping" its membership, financial assistance was dedicated to the preservation of life only. Not the preservation or growth of the quality of life. So if you had a medical life transition and a mortgage, they might pay for you to dump the mortgage and move to a tiny apartment while also receiving some food pantry items on a semi-regular frequency. Their goal was to keep you alive, not to give you a living. At the time, excess bills like cell phones, internet, cars, etc. were recommended to be removed and/or deducted from assistance given (in urban areas; rural areas cars were not really a focus, there was some autonomy in the people making the decisions). Only what was needed to remain alive.

I bring this up not because I necessarily agree with the approach, but rather to ask what we mean by "living" wage. The typical idea is that it allows people to afford food, shelter, and basic necessities (cue tangent discussion regarding American healthcare). Under this definition, are people willing to bunk up six to a room and expand WIC/SNAP? Because that is what a "living" wage can be -- not a great existence but not dying while working full time.

The usual excuse for this Spartan approach is that there aren't enough resources. For current program funding levels this is true. And in the US, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot for further resource growth -- regulations and policies are continually cherry picked, unprotected, and embattled to the point that the cost burden to maintain even the status quo is overwhelming, whether in implementation (NIMBYism) or in infrastructure (environmental impact studies taking years and decades) or in ideals (protecting water and air via the EPA).

Ideally we could organize, right? Unionize, make our collective voices heard. While a wonderful thing to enable, and there are many great outcomes when it happens, unions are subject to corruption as well -- I am not sure there is a legal framework that helps overcome that particularly pernicious principal/agent problem.

So, in this brief review, we arrive to your same conclusion, that we structurally probably can't support every job having a high enough wage to satisfy each to their wants. We can hope and want and organize for it, but until we have some significant structural changes in society and policy it seems unattainable to me :(

When the majority of wealth isn't owned by a group roughly the size of the population of Fairlea WV we can start having meaningful conversations about what we can and can't afford.

I recommend we not wait that long to begin meaningful change, monarchies have a tendency to stick around until the guillotine is ready, and then many more than the monarchy fall to its impact.

While I don't disagree with anything you've said I don't see a viable path to change. Step 1A is wresting control of legislative bodies from the most well funded individuals and corporate entities on the planet.

Protecting water & air is, in fact, very materialistic. Nobody wants to live in the exclusion zone.

Indeed. But the definition of what is protected and by what methods can be somewhat idealistic.

As an almost absurdist starting point that highlights this spectrum - several eons ago byproducts from bacteria poisoned the atmosphere and threatened life on earth until plants and eventually animals evolved, enabling homeostasis to occur.

And some people today live at the periphery of Chernobyl by choice, much like the animals in the exclusion zone that are thriving.

So it's reasonable to point to an implemented standard and consider it an ideal, perhaps even worth defending!

I think you are on the right path. I've seen the arguments that "minimum wage" should be able to afford a median priced 2BR apartment (30% of income). Then who rents the bottom third apartments? I'm all for a bottom tier safety net to keep people off the streets.

We've decided servicing slumlords' profit margins is now a societal goal?

Only when we forget that affordable housing is also in those lower brackets.

So now, as a society, we've decided that slumlords are the key to affordable housing? I swear if the bar gets any lower someone's going to have to rent an excavator to dig the hole.

slum lords, as in government housing like NYCHA?

Clearly not, although there's an entire other conversation to be had about the state of play of government housing.

> There are millions of people who can have a livable wage in a service industry.

There are millions of illegal immigrants, living 5 to a bedroom proping up the resturant industry. The back of house doesn't do very well at all, its only the wait staff that makes a fair wage for the effort.

The solution is not to provide assistance to underpaid illegals. Better to penalize the company for hiring and underpaying them.

Ok so having roughly doubled the cost of restaurant meals what's our next move?

Not eat out often. Only on special occasions.

K so having bankrupted the restaurant industry, what's next?

Isn't America supposed to be the richest country in the world? You can afford to pay people a decent wage you just don't want to.

You could double the price of a beer in NYC or Miami and people would still come.

In fact they seem to have done this each time I've visited...

Then we don't need so many immigrants.

Apparently we do if having a restaurant industry is desirable. We've already established raising wages to something that might attract less desperate applicants is a non-starter. Now if you were to say pivot the conversation to the H1-B system that fills more desirable jobs...

You aren't entitled to below cost dinners.

You trying to make this about me? I'm just the messenger. Restaurant margins don't support increased wages without passthrough to customers. People already bitch about the overhead associated with tipping waitstaff, one can easily extrapolate how they'd react to the changes in restaurant prices associated with labor costs tripling. If that makes you sad take it up with your neighbors.