Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
A lousy $12 bucks an hour for unskilled labor during the Christmas rush?
I thought Target was a progressive company. Why do they hate poor people and want them to die? Fight for 15!
Why, it’s almost as if nobody who knows the faintest thing about business actually believes that $15/hour crap.
Target allows men to use the women’s restroom…, so they only have to pay $12/hr.
Right Greg. Target is friendly towards all manner of debauchery and mental dysfunction.
This is the one time of the year folks who can’t pass a drug screen can make the big bucks.
Swiftee is correct on the drug test thing. Faced with a shortage of labor, many companies, Target included, has stopped pre employment drug testing. I guess that they figure there are too many people toking to disqualify them. As long as their background checks come back clean, those candidates are good to go.
Let’s see, full-time work at $15/hr, that’s $30,000/year, 150% of poverty level for a family of FOUR! To keep one person out of poverty, they need to earn about… $7.50! So, to all those proponents of this economically stupid idea, what is the annual pay for somebody making ZERO $/hr?
It is more complicated than it seems.
Worldview #1: Finish high-school, get married, show up everyday on-time and you will land solidly in the middle-class. In other words, his $30K plus her $30 = $60K – even minus a hefty cost for childcare (average $6K) and healthcare (north of $6K).
Worldview #2: Try finding a full-time job for $15. They are out there, but not enough for everyone who finished high-school, got married, showed up everyday, on-time.
Not all those jobs at Fedex, Target, Wal-Mart and Amazon are 2,000 hours a year.
You think Jeff Bezos is going to hire a full time staff? Think again.
So okay, jobs is jobs, full-time is full-time, part-time is part-time and seasonal is seasonal – but why do you think Fedex, Target, WalMart and Amazon are so gung-ho on immigration and the welfare state?
It kinda works for them, don’t it?
I know the world has changed since I grew up but I honestly don’t remember a time when I worked AS FEW AS 40 hours per week.
When my full-time job was going to high school, college or law school, I worked part-time jobs evenings and weekends and holidays delivering papers, making tacos, filing employee pay reports.
When my full-time job was lawyering, I worked evenings and weekends and holidays to make my billable-hours quota.
When I left the practice of law to become a bureaucrat, I bought rental properties and worked on them evenings and weekends and holidays.
I’m not exceptional in brains or gumption. Where I come from, my experience is about average. How does it happen that young people today can’t do what people of my generation routinely did?
Advice for poor teens…
they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.
Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.
Follow those 3, pretty freaking easy, steps and YOU HAVE A 75% CHANCE OF JOINING THE MIDDLE CLASS AND ONLY 2% CANCE AT REMAINING IN POVERETY. In other words your are 37 times more likely to end up in the middle class than not. Just finish high school, dont become a teen parent and get a fucking full time job, even if its a shitty one. Hell Ive worked at a gas station, Jimmy Johns, Jersey Mikes, and a grocery store before getting the job Im currently at.
Greg,
I’d like to know where I can get healthcare and childcare for $6K each. My health insurance is over $7K in premiums plus co-pays and co-insurance before benefits kick in. I can pay northward of $15K before my out of pocket caps kick in.
Back when both my wife and I worked and we only had 1 child, daycare was more than my mortgage. 4 years ago we were paying $1200/mo. There’s a discount on the 2nd child, but it didn’t make sense for my wife to keep working when daycare costs would’ve gone north of $2K/mo.
Smith, I low-balled the costs of daycare and insurance. It is a knee-jerk reaction on my part to low-ball estimates, given the tendency of our dear brothers and sisters on the left to go into exaggerated hysterics on every point.
Goddamn, having a family is pricey… hopefully I can afford it in these next couple years.
POD, marry a woman who wants to be a mom. Then agree that mom is her job.
I know several people who get by on one income. It’s not impossible…If planned right it’s not even that difficult.
Thats the plan. I wont date someone who doesnt want 3+ kids.
Also I make it clear in any dating profile I have that I plan to make enough money so my future wife can stay home. It helps eliminate the SJW and leftists without flat out saying it.
What Smith says about the costs of having kids in daycare. I remember calculating how much my wife would actually take home if she worked after our first was born, and it was about a buck an hour. Not much compensation for being away from the baby 50 hours a week including commute and lunch! Big hitters; taxes (40% of gross–remember it’s additional income!), daycare ($750/month at the time), vehicle expenses ($5k/year), additional meals ($2k/year), additional work wardrobe ($1k/year), tithe (10% of gross), and additional medical expenses ($1500).
That last bit was from a Kaiser Foundation study that found that babies that are formula-fed had about that much additional medical expense annually. We saw it in action as little ones born about the same time had dozens of ear infections to our infant’s zero. Not that we never saw the doctor, but the difference was stark!
And if you thought “the federal and state governments are blithering idiots for promoting daycare and bottle feeding through subsidies and WIC”, move to the head of the class, as Dr. Williams notes.
It’s also worth noting that a lot of this “fight for $15” is really intended to make things like single parenting easier–but the overall welfare burden is driven by….you guessed it, single parenting. Blithering idiots in DC and Pig’s Eye, to put it mildly.
Imagine what day care will cost when the providers are paid $15/hour with full healthcare benefits, city mandated sick and vacation time, etc.
For infants, minimum staff: child ratio is 1:4 in Minnesota. So for a child in daycare for ~240 days per year for 9-10 hours per day, that’s $10000 per child in labor costs alone (including FICA). You haven’t even paid for the facility, insurance, and the like.
http://www.dhs.state.mn.us/main/groups/licensing/documents/defaultcolumns/dhs-292309.pdf
You can have more kids/provider at older ages, but having tried to care for bunches of kids myself–I have six and head my church’s Sunday Schools–I don’t think that going much beyond six kids per provider would be very smart.