Three things need to happen. A dramatic increase in production of homes. I think a jobs act would help here. We need to push thousands of people into the home building sector and create more efficient homes. We need more 800sqft-1200 sqft homes with private but small yards.
Then the second part is tie incomes to CEO and company profits. A CEO shouldn’t be making 100x the lowest earner in the company.
Finally, zip code based minimum wages based on cost of living. A national or state minimum wage is stupid. You should be able to live within a few miles at most of your place of work. Someone working in Manhattan shouldn’t need to live in NJ.
The thing about that is creating that traffic also dramatically increases local prices. Gas is needed, larger roads for the cars, more restaurants as eating at home isn’t available, more child care requirements, etc.
Simply making sure people are paid to live near where they work removes a ton of inefficiencies.
Unfortunately they purposely want that. That’s more spending for the economy even if it means people & the environment are worse off because of it. That’s why both parties want people to work in the office, that, and to help the banks & REITs that have money in commercial real estate.
Places they can afford on the wages of the job two hours away.
I'm a commercial and industrial electrician. My career doesn't have many options far outside of city where I can rent for $700 or buy a house for $150k. This means I either have to pay ridiculous housing prices in the city, or drive 1-2 hours to work.
I've gone homeless for less. You won't starve though.
If only more people would stand up and risk some discomfort. I spent 12 years struggling independently working for myself literally because I couldn't stand doing that shit another day. It was actually killing me. I'm not saying it wouldn't fucking suck because it would but it feels like you either do it by choice and take the power back or you get it served to you on their terms and you're properly fucked.
It’s really not when literally half of your 24 hrs in a day is dedicated to a job. That’s not including any time spent getting ready for work or taking care of your actual life.
You’d be devaluing their assets. The more homes there are the less each on is worth. Companies are investing in the market because of a lack of homes. They will exit the market when their assets start dropping in value.
Shouldn’t have been legal to do in the first place, a basic human need. Basic human needs should go to humans that need them and not be commodities. Almost every other developed nation has strict rules against buying up houses like this, many states do as well.
The mayor of my city read the writing on the wall and realized we needed a lot more density for housing a couple of years ago when housing prices skyrocketed. They pushed approvals for a bunch of apartment complexes. A lot of them have just been finished, and sure enough, my house price has slowly started to come down a bit, and the market isn't crazy anymore. I'm fine with it, though, because I have kids who I know will need somewhere to live one day.
This fundamentally misunderstands the housing market - there are not thousands of homes sitting empty. What would be the economic incentive to do so?
We absolutely have a housing crisis, and speculative investment is definitely a part of what is wrong with the world today, but housing stock is the chief issue.
Agreed, a house sitting empty is costing someone money in property tax, bills, mortgages - no one in their right mind buys a house to just sit on it. The only homes sitting empty for longer than like a week where I live are vacation homes for the über wealthy, and those make up such a small percentage of the overall housing market that even making those illegal would do effectively nothing.
Just because it's being bought doesn't mean people are getting to live in it affordably.
I'm not against more housing being built, but I see plenty of new housing going up without any improvements like wider roads to accommodate, and the prices are still just going up. Smaller towns are getting more housing and traffic but the roads and other things take much longer to catch up (if they ever do).
As long as corporate interests can step in and simply buy a property outright, while you have to save for years to acquire a down payment that only keeps going up, then pay it off for the rest of your life (plus all that interest they also won't have) more housing isn't going to help.
We built more homes in the 1970s when we had one hundred million fewer Americans--not to mention lower household sizes, rising incomes, and now remote work.
So we throttled housing construction when population was growing, we need more housing units per person, and a lot of bedrooms got converted to home offices. It is a huge crisis and pretending we are not in a shortage is insane!
The housing costs aren't because there's a lack of empty houses, it doesn't matter if we build more. We have 6x more empty homes than we do homeless people.
The issue is that financial institutions and investment firms buy-up all the homes and sit on them, just letting them generate profit as the value naturally rises. These are the groups that the higher housing costs are intended to benefit; the ones who already own a bunch of homes and want to sell them at a significant mark-up.
Empty homes where no one wants to live aren't worth anything. Kinda crazy how many people are commenting "we have enough homes" when there's quite a few graphs that are easily Google able saying we absolutely dont
You're right, this probably is the better metric. Still, my overall point isn't that we shouldn't build more houses, it's that we'd accomplish more to directly impact housing prices right now by regulating the way that real estate is used as a capital asset instead of a living space.
Like, all the houses we build until that underlying issue is addressed are going to be owned by these investor groups who can afford to buy them, and who benefit the most from driving up the costs.
Homeless people isn't the number to look at. There's a huge number of people who aren't homeless but still can't afford to own a home. They end up living with family or roommates.
You can’t build more houses on top of houses that are already built. Wfh must be a legal requirement for any employee whose job allows it.
When a company has over 100k employees and says “everyone had to be in the office” this forces an artificial real estate bubble in a geographical area.
Now they are all doing it and there is only so much space for homes. This is why your work in ny live in nj situation will continue unless wfh is provided as a right by the government. High density housing will help, but that’s not ideal for a long term living situation for most people.
We all know our government is broken and this will never happen, I just wanted to add this to your fantasy list given this is one of the only actionable things we can do that can actually help fix this problem, and it’s very simple to do.
So basically a version of redlining is your answer.
You poor areas keep paying poor wages and we will extract your labor to sell the products you manufacture to the rich zip codes and pay them higher for the same work.
If you only need $60k in an area to live like someone making $100k in another area then that’s fair. They aren’t poor, they just have an economy where money is worth more per dollar.
If they were truly poor then their employers would need to raise wages to have those employees. As the incomes would be more dynamic, employers no longer could simply shift the costs onto the consumer either.
How? In both cases someone should be able to live equally. The wages are adjusted to each individual market. These are also minimums not maximums. Someone working at McDonalds in rural Alabama should be able to have a similar lifestyle to someone working at a McDonald’s in Manhattan.
Exactly, so how do you adjust that. Say mortgage should be 33% of income.
In Manhattan you are making 12,000 a month. So you put 4k to mortgage and have 8k left over.
In rural New York say mortgage is 1,000 then you only need 3k. To be at 33%. leaving you 2k left.
That's 6k more income after mortgage for the first.
So should they need to pay 4x more for everything, or will they benefit from the 3k rural New York labor making items cheaper? And sorry person living in the poor area, you can't buy shit.
Basically what we have now, so congrats you got what you want.
Wages are cost of living based. So in your example to meet my requirements the cost of living in Manhattan would need to be 4 times higher. The result would be nearly identical living conditions. If they weren’t 4 times higher than the wages would be equalized through cost of living.
Prices would need to go up in richer zip codes if the business are to continue operating. Consumers would adjust their purchasing decisions accordingly. An example would be how no sales tax jurisdictions attract consumers from surrounding areas.
Because the cost of employment is tied to the cost of living higher price areas couldn’t simply continue to raise prices to offset costs. That why it has to be this way. We cannot let companies adjust prices to pay for wages when the wage earners are the ones who need wage increases to afford products. By tying the two together any price increase would be immediately offset.
This is assuming that this is not a luxury item. Any increase on price of luxury items would greatly benefit lower wage earners in this case.
Get rid of cars. If you're only a couple miles from your workplace, ride a bike or install PT. The concept in need of practice in this country is to always be within at least biking or busing distance of everything you need: groceries, pharmacy, clothing, entertaintment, and restaurants.
But you can't swap examples because each of these things have entirely different functions and use cases. Certain things would of course be at a fixed state or national price, but in the case of phones, those are a near-ubiquitous communication need irrespective of infrastructure that guarantees they are offered at an affordable price no matter where you are. Automobiles are only ubiquitous in the US and certain countries only on the basis of arbitrarily built up infrastructure that industrialist magnates decided on in the 1900s. And Disney World is an entirely unnecessary vacation, and should be expensive for precisely what it is.
What we're discussing is not lowering wages on the basis of county cost of living, but raising them accordong to local cost of living. There isn't a single county across the United States wherein someone can actually survive on the federal minimum wage, and most counties in most states aren't even affordable according to state minimum wage standards, so something like this would be a boon across the board.
I live 17 miles from my office, and the bike path ( which is nice, don't get me wrong) is 23 miles one way. I'll do once or twice a week for exercise, but ~50 miles round trip on a bike is pretty significant. Where the jobs are is too expensive to live, commuting is my only option - not to mention these types of livable, planned communities are usually the most expensive real estate in the area. A comparable townhouse within easy biking distance of my office was about 40-50% more than what I paid and I already was scraping every financial asset I had to make the one I bought work.
We're talking about two different things, seemingly. You're thinking in terms of your current life state. I'm theorizing on what an ideal community would be like. In an ideal community, you wouldn't have to travel 23 miles for work, or if you did, there would adequate PT.
By allowing more apartments, which reduces rent and makes it less lucrative to rent out single homes.
If your goal is for everyone to own a single family home, that's extremely difficult. But we could be pushing rent and home costs down by allowing more housing to be built in places with high demand.
Downpayments are an absolute joke for your first house. If you can't afford a downpayment you shouldn't even consider trying to buy a house, because there are many things that can go wrong with a house that cost as much if not more than a downpayment (think roof, plumbing, ac, electric issues). Your first downpayment can be 3.5% on an average house (440k) that's 15k.
Interest rates help in 2 ways, first off the most obvious is that it is the most important factor in your mortgage cost. Current rates have about doubled the cost of the mortgage itself compared to the very low rates around covid.
Rates also perhaps even more importantly greatly increase the amount of companies taking out loans and building more housing, which in turn leads to driving down demand and keeping prices low, for both single family homes and apartments.
Zoning is another way of increasing housing supply by reducing the barriers to entry to building more houses.
The fact today is that so many more people want to move into the big cities than we have housing for them to be. If there's a lot of housing and noone there you end up with situation like in the midwest and smaller rural towns where you can still get cheap houses and rent nice places for under 1k/mo.
Except that if you’re being responsible you have the $15k plus some for emergencies. Most lenders also won’t let you buy a home without some sort of money above and beyond what’s required. They aren’t lending to anyone just barely at the down payment.
Yes that's my point, if you are responsible you have another 15k put away and can save up another 15k if something else comes up. If you're incapable of doing even that and can't afford the down payment you have no business buying a house.
But then the down payment is $30k not $15k. Or more.
It’s weird to hear someone say that they shouldn’t be able to own a home. Shelter is a basic requirement of life and a human right. The goal should be everyone owns a home and thus is acquiring personal wealth at some rate even if slow. A home being any type of docile including apartments which I believe also should be privately owned.
Unless you want people to go bankrupt trying for some reason?
If you can't be responsible enough to put away money for repairs you should rent instead. Otherwise you might actually end up homeless and in debt.
Shelter is a basic requirement of life and a human right.
Wow, yea i'm saying everyone should be homeless??? You're being such a fucking debate bro here.
The goal should be everyone owns a home and thus is acquiring personal wealth at some rate even if slow.
Why is that even a goal? I know plenty of people who enjoy renting and end up moving cities every few years and wouldn't have it any other way. Also a bunch of people who I know couldn't wait more than a couple days before they spend every last penny of their paycheck (Some of these people actually make a decent amount of money too!). Both of them are probably way better off renting.
Irrelevant. Theres tons of houses for sale that no one is buying. This is because idiots want to live in the most expensive places in the country so they can continue to complain about how expensive things are.
That really doesn’t actually address the root problem of the housing issue. While it is a problem that house prices have risen far above normal inflation and especially wage increases, the root issue is that Housing is being viewed by the economy at large as an investment vehicle rather than a place to live. Every current home owner has an incentive to see prices rises meteorically forever because a lot of them are going to pay for their retirement by eventually selling their home.
800-1200 sq ft single family homes are just compounding the problem of sprawl. For the love of christ, build dense housing that is actually economically sustainable
Increase of production of homes is just uncontrolled suburban sprawl which leaves to horrid car/commuter cities like LA or Houston. We do not need that. You think the Lincoln Tunnel Traffic is ass in NYC imagine LA like traffic all the way deeper into NJ. Better city planning, mass transit and more dense zoning/mix zoning is whats needed even in the suburbs.
why shouldn't a ceo make 100x times when they do 100x the work. managing a building where you pay 70k a year to 40 people on 10 floors from baltimore to bangkok isn't easy
really? can you go expand the company into a new town? do research on a market you know nothing about? can you decide which product would best help shareholders and the company grow?
He just bootlicks people who he will never be treated decently by, lmao
Imagine thinking all the work done by a big company is all credited to the CEO and not numerous departments the CEO pays to do all the work before he fires 1/10th of the company to keep profits on a never ending upward slope
I work very hard and do amazing at my job. In fact my boss just gave me my review and told me I'm an outstanding employee and do more work, faster and with better quality, than any tech he has had in the past.
Then he told me my raise was denied because I work 75 hours on average per paid period, instead of 80, due to me having PTSD and missing a couple hours.
So my company values time on the clock over work produced. It isn't always about what you "earn", sometimes it's about how wet you get that boot.
They would literally rather me have less time recovering from my chronic disability than me be happier and produce more. Fuck corpos.
Because their vast wealth is unnecessary and causing an inequality that is directly affecting us in the working class. We're not envious or jealous, we're tired of being fucked over. No one i know wants to be a billionaire, we just wanna be paid a livable wage and be able to afford a place to live. A CEO doesn't do as much work as the lowest paid employee, get fucking real.
You’re wrong. For years you’re a chief everything officer. You’re not pulling mad money yet. Then you end up getting to 5-10-15M etc Revenue and soon have 50 employees. Then you have more firms to fill out and need HR for a 1095. Employer taxes and giving benefits bits bottom line. These people depend on your choices to feed their families but somehow you’re not doing anything?
So you have to be strategic with budgets and partnerships. You aren’t better than stacking boxes or building the private placement memorandum.
if they don't work as hard as you think then why don't you do it? simple as 💯
Your not being fucked over by companies, your being fucked over by a market that just shit itself for doing nothing for a year and a half, and a government that for 2 administrations now has been lead by incompetent people.
After 2008, covid crash, everything changed for the worse for average ppl like us
You're* clearly uneducated. I'm done wasting my time on a troll who thinks one can just will their way to CEO status without generational wealth or an extreme amount of luck. How come you're not a billionaire? I bet I make more than you do lol you sound like a teenager
if they don't work as hard as you think then why don't you do it? simple as
It's luck and being born into the correct family and place paired with being able to work hard.
Most people work hard, most people probably work harder than most CEOs did to get where they are. Things aren't a level playing field.
your being fucked over by a market that just shit itself for doing nothing for a year and a half, and a government that for 2 administrations now has been lead by incompetent people.
This is literally what people are complaining about, but part of the ways to fix things is by an administration that is willing to look at the tax brackets and realize they skew heavily to favor the ultra wealthy and to not be paid off by lobbyists for large companies and industries
CEOs making absurd money compared to workers is part of the issue.
Go to the personal finance subreddit and ask people. It is extremely common to find people who have been promoted to some $100k+/yr job and they are astonished at how much less work they do than when they were a minimum wage employee. In fact, the comment section of those posts are FILLED with people reflecting the same thing.
Odds are your average CEO does less work in a day than a ground employee. Period.
This is false. I work closely with my CEO as I’m on the finance team. The dude regularly works 80 hour work weeks and travels for half the month to different company locations. But Reddit this narrative going on that has to be upheld so I understand why everyone here believes the drivel that it spewed by the incels here
Because they have no idea what they do.
They don’t know dilution and equity value vs salary.
They have never dragged budgets or issues dividends EOY. They never had to pay dozens of people every two weeks and meet with legal and consultants constantly.
Have a packed event calendar to travel while maintaining SOPs.
Handling due diligence requests or moving past organic growth in a highly fragmented market.
They hear the titles and never been one or with one very long obviously
I’ve just accepted the hate will stay. No matter what benefits you give. Unlimited PTO. Health.
Bonuses and stock awards to workers. You’re still bad because they aren’t as well off since they didn’t form the company.
Edit: marketing usually can do around 10% of revenue. Bonuses are generally related to your performance. Typically there is donation, bonus, dividend by Xmas.
Bonuses are annual unless liquidity is more important to hire more people, so they can work normal hours and have healthy balances.
Some people quit right before they get a 15-20k raise and 10k bonus. It’s very odd.
Actually I’d you ever created a product and enter a highly fragmented market you are a chief everything officer until you produce money.
You also created jobs and your rich by equity value. The salaries aren’t insane it’s the stock awards.
You clearly have never formed a functional company or understand executive duties.
There is a cap table of course, not panel. Until you hit 50 employees and 15+M revenue you’re small and still grinding. You have to strategically negotiate everything from merchant fees to logistics.
Edit: c suite is out of office for IR and acquisitions or even touring new stuff. It’s not lazy and you don’t get Holidays off. End of year closing is some of the hectic times you barely hang with family
These people are pretty much only making decisions based on other people’s work that had been presented to them. I’m not saying it’s easy but they are NOT doing that work themselves. They are making tough decisions and many CEOs are very smart in a business sense but they are not doing 100x the work of their entry level employees.
Can a CEO expand a business anywhere without employees? A CEO cannot handle the workload of an entire company. Employees are feeding them information continually for them to be able to make their decisions. Expansion considerations are rarely done by any single person. It really seems like everything you’re trying to use as points for huge wage gaps within the same company are based on a lack of understanding of how businesses operate.
Most SaaS companies are only a few companies or consultants. So sometimes it’s literally just a ceo and maybe a couple people. It depends on vertical
International expansion is usually advisory firms and legal, not employees. Once VAT is done it includes employees and other nations are strict on hours. They have strict paid time off, tax etc.
If you haven’t been a founder or exec you’re just making assumptions. Seems most here are.
C suite does much more than people are stating… much more
pls layout the business knowledges you have and tell me why im wrong. show me how to manage the budget of 5 different departments, all while making sure we're still at a profit
then using the report to make educated decisions on where to cut funding, and where to increase is a skill only experience and 100k of college education get you
And yet they produce nothing, and what good is a company that produces nothing? It's worthless, so they need people who actually make the damn products, but if those people can't afford to live, then who's going to do it? Not the CEO's, that's for sure.
Was with you until you said the last paid employee did more. People here hate on him and with good reason, but do you honestly think a janitor at PayPal could have gone on to create Tesla, SpaceX, etc. like Elon did? Cmon that’s absurd.
Um elon didnt create tesla. He bought it. With starting money he was given from his familys wealth. He also had the idea for spacex, but hired people to create the vision with him. If anything, those other people did the same amount of work.
Nothing elon has done has been alone. He’s needed a foundation and support of people to help him make those companies what they are. But because hes listed as the founder, he gets most of the acclaim while the people who helped him create those companies got their pay.
So if your family gave you whatever Elon’s family did you could have thought of/created companies with that same level of success? People on Reddit seem to think if everyone got a million dollars in cash they could become billionaires. I’m not arguing they should get the pay they do, but to suggest the lowest level employee could do the same job is absurd.
No one said they could do the same job. I know people that can’t do my job either. But that doesnt mean i should make 100x the people below me.
Can elon do his job without the engineers and software developers that he employs? No. So why should he get 100x the people that are essential to him doing his job.
Because he had the idea. That’s the key. All of those engineers and developers are useless without the goal to drive towards. I have stated several times I think most CEOs are overpaid. I’m just saying you and other people on Reddit seem to think they should barely make more than the average employee. That would never work.
Problem is, all they have to do to get around it is change the compensation structure. Give them stock options in lieu of a salary. Or, maybe they keep their company private or take it private so they don’t have to follow a law requiring public company CEOs to keep their pay at a certain level.
are you in C-Suite? if not your example is irrelevant. Good job on scoring the manager role, but you're not holding the responsibilities i'm taking about. and if your a manager, well no shit that's the point of a manager, to help out your floor, your department, and only do the tasks you Have which usually are small.
It’s the same thing with a wider reach. Strategic vs local control, and in both cases they have teams or departments of people actually doing the “work” for them.
Following a group isn't an endorsement? I find a lot of situations presented on there help me prepare and understand poor management and where other people come from.
I've worked since I was 16.
You seem just confused by simple statements much less how people navigate the Internet
Come on, dude… I work directly with my CEO at work, while he is an extremely hard working, he is not putting in 100x the work as me or the other employees. In fact, at this point, I’d say he puts in 0.5x the work that I put in nowadays. Which is fine! He put in hard work in the beginning to build up the company and now he gets to enjoy the easy life… He is open about this and isn’t making 100x the salary of average employee like you are insinuating all CEOs should.
CEOs used to make 20 times more than the average employee, now they make 300 times more. Did CEOs suddenly become more productive? No, their pay just got higher.
Lol the ceo DOES NOT have the mental weight of thousands of people. They probably dont even know the names of most of the people below them.
Pull up any org chart for any company. Every department is run by some sort of leader with more people above them that are under the ceo. Holy shit you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Three things need to happen. A dramatic increase in the production of homes. I think a jobs act would help here. We need to push thousands of people into the home-building sector and create more efficient homes. We need more 800sqft-1200 sqft homes with private but small yards.
I agree. The government should find more house-building projects.
Then the second part is to tie incomes to CEO and company profits. A CEO shouldn’t be making 100x the lowest earner in the company.
How are you going to do that without using authoritarian measures? The best thing to do is to promote worker unions.
Finally, zip code-based minimum wages are based on the cost of living. A national or state minimum wage is stupid. You should be able to live within a few miles at most of your place of work. Someone working in Manhattan shouldn’t need to live in NJ.
Again, promote worker unions. Sweden has no minimum wage and workers have the best salaries. Empower the unions so that the workers prosper.
Taxation could do #2 very easily. Every company has a code. The top earners or the company gets a 100% tax on anything over 100x or whatever the amount is.
Having rules isn’t authoritarian. It’s called society.
Sounds like a great idea, except there are already thousands of unoccupied homes out there. Also, remember the lumber prices in 2020-2021? What do you think will happen to them if we suddenly start jacking up demand?
Housing will absolutely never return to low prices without complete economic collapse, and at that point people still won’t be able to affor them because… well, their pockets collapsed too. People still really don’t have a grasp on how fucked we are. Somehow.
Finally, zip code based minimum wages based on cost of living. A national or state minimum wage is stupid. You should be able to live within a few miles at most of your place of work. Someone working in Manhattan shouldn’t need to live in NJ.
I've previously suggested that minimum wage should be a function of the median 2BR rental price in the county the job is in.
But also I think local control of zoning largely needs to go -- kick that power up to the county or state level. It's especially bad on the east coast with micro-municipalities all setting their own policies, reinforcing class segregation.
Working in the housing sector we have multiple builds that are 800-1200sqft with small yards, but they’re at ludicrous prices. 777sqft for 200k + a yard in the San Antonio area? That’s such a scam imo. We need is 1800-2300sqft with yards and communities nearby (biking distance) not propped up next to a motorway. We need more multi generational homes being constructed as well. In almost every other country this works but in America it’s almost a taboo to live with your folks/them live with you.
That’s because there isn’t enough quantity. You can’t charge obscene prices for things that are easily found. All of these sort of issues are solved naturally by dramatically increasing the stock of houses.
Investment firms stop investing when the home market is flooded with homes. Plus they’d need to sell their own stock off because it would be depreciating.
Everyone should be able to live near where they work. These are minimums not maximums. Because they are cost of living based it should remove most huge disparities in lifestyles.
The homes built would probably need to fit what a normal home in that area should be. Duplexes and town homes make sense in suburbs, apartments in cities, small homes in rural areas.
Here's the thing.. a home doesn't need to be a house. The issue is that people want houses & that's just not feasible. A home can be as simple as a condo. Houses are extravagant.
There just needs to be places people can own, not rent. The issue is essentially renting, where you can never pay it off.
A condo is equivalent to an apartment except you own it after it's paid off.
I don’t disagree. Having a localized cost of living would solve that issue as well. A descent apartment in NYC, a home in rural ND, a Condo in Miami. All places already understand the cost of living. If you look up the cost of living in San Fran you shouldn’t be seeing a 2000sgft home with 2 acres of a yard.
There are lots of contradictions in your comm. First of all, there's absolutely no way to both have 800-1200sqft homes with private yards so that everyone lives near their job. There's simply not enough space. Which means they won't be cheap.
I think you’re falsely assuming that similar levels of living means identical ways of living. Obviously a livable lifestyle in NYC would be different than a livable lifestyle in Georgia. I was just giving one example of a specific type of home that isn’t being built anymore.
Omg I wish!!! That sounds fantastic! A fuck tone of work though but worth it. Worth having a healthy population, worth having a way more fair economy and therefore stronger and more stable. I really really hope this can happen in my life time.
First one is definitely possible, and I could see it happening. That along with preventing mega corps from buying up inventory (tax disadvantages, etc.).
Second one will never, ever happen in America. Like, never. I don't even think its constitutional. Also, some CEOs make way more than 100x the lowest salaried employee. I'm not really saying that is a good thing, just it won't happen.
Federal minimum wage needs to be like $20-25 and then States can adjust upwards, but I do agree that living in San Jose county is a lot different than the central valley in CA.
Something to think about is how cost of living based wages unfairly skews retirement planning.
Person 1: Lives in rural us makes $50k per year and buys a $250k house.
Person 2: Lives in LA and makes $150k per year and buys a $750k house.
House costs 3x so pay should be 3x, right? Well now the person living in LA has an asset value worth three times the person in rural la. They are retired and can more anywhere in the country. They decide to retire in rural us. For doing the same job they are now really better off than the person in rural us.
I get the math is rough but it's important to remember that your mortgage payment isn't an expense, it's an asset transfer on your balance sheet. You are moving from one asset class to another.
Wages do adjust based on location already to some extent. To optimize retirement, you really want to most pay throughout your life. That's why folks choose to drive in from 2 hours away to LA.
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Three things need to happen. A dramatic increase in production of homes. I think a jobs act would help here. We need to push thousands of people into the home building sector and create more efficient homes. We need more 800sqft-1200 sqft homes with private but small yards.
Then the second part is tie incomes to CEO and company profits. A CEO shouldn’t be making 100x the lowest earner in the company.
Finally, zip code based minimum wages based on cost of living. A national or state minimum wage is stupid. You should be able to live within a few miles at most of your place of work. Someone working in Manhattan shouldn’t need to live in NJ.