New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”
The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”
Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.
Do people in power not realize that if workers make more money they’ll also spend more money, thereby helping businesses profit?
That would result in a redistribution of wealth. I think most billionaires would rather live in an Ivory Tower in the middle of the desert than live in a 10-bedroom mansion alongside lesser millionaires in a diverse and prosperous city. They really couldn’t give a shit about normal people which is why people like Bezos want to bring in robots to do the work.
Seems they began the process of willfully ignoring this fact in the 1970s, and it’s now gotten to the point where no, they don’t realize, because they’re so divorced from reality they can’t.
The late 1970s was when the top tier tax rate fell below punitive levels. Unlike in the 1950s and 1960s (91% top-tier tax rate), there was more benefit to accepting the tax than spending the excess revenue on deductible expenses.
The tax policy used to drive the rich to spend their money rather than hoard it.
But the rich lose control when wealth is redistributed
Without breaking monopolies weath redistribution will end up mostly going bad to the same bilionaires and mega companies
But then the poors will have more power.
A strong middle class is much harder to rule.
Everyone crying that it won’t work, I NEVER see them suggest an alternative to the cost of living crisis. Their plan is just to get slowly boiled alive like wtf.
LA put a mansion tax on homes selling over a certain value and I was told it would crash the market…spoiler it didn’t.
Kinda wish it would’ve crashed the market. Maybe then it’d slow folks getting pushed into the Inland Empire and crash the construction of housing tracts
The rich will always have a soft landing when there’s a crash (many even profit from it). Best way to liberate their wealth from them is through taxation.
Because instead we should have high density apartment complexes owned by corporations and no one will ever own their own property and constantly be paying rent to the companies?
I have this debate all the time in the Uk pushing my leftist ideals and I’m always met with it won’t work rah rah rah. And I’m like well maybe we could try because for the last 42 years of my life of unfettered capitalism things have gotten worse and worse for most people so clearly this isn’t working so let’s just try something radical for 5 fucking years aye.
I’m not even capping but if the greens don’t get elected next election there’s a none zero chance i am going to throw my life away by murdering people of the elite class because the alternative is to just plod along and nothing changes.
I’m doing alright too. But I care about all people and we should judge our society on how we treat the poorest in it. I will fucking die on this hill, just depends how many I take with me.
That’s what crazy to me. Ppl afraid of “radical new ideas” when the same old shit clearly isn’t working.
I’m not gonna try and talk you down, everyones frustrated and fed up with the state of things. I would say be careful what you post online these days. We all just feel powerless to make any meaningful changes in the world around us :/
Truly boggles my mind.
I appreciate you looking out and honestly I’ve been trying to push the boundaries of what you can say online lately and seeing if I get any knocks on the door, although I feel this stuff would only be discovered after the fact, and I actually went postal. Rather than someone coming to check I’m not insane.
At some point though I do believe that violence is the only answer to an oppressive system and I would happily lose my freedom in service to my end goals. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that and we can spread awareness about more progressive policies.
Everyone: What if we just throw people in jail for being poor or other behaviors associated with poverty? Surely nobody would choose to be poor then!
Their plan is “I got mine, fuck everyone else.”
Who is crying that? I mean that isn’t a corporate mouthpiece? Just adjusted for inflation, federal minimum wage should be like $35.
I’ve met several people who buy into how minimum wage just leads to higher prices. They think they’re smart because they’re considering a consequence beyond just “people get more money”, but they’re not understanding that few workers serve many customers, so to give a fast food worker an extra dollar per hour you really only need to raise prices maybe like 1%, and then workers have more money to spend on luxury stuff like fast food, so business actually picks up as a result of paying people more.
I don’t think they actually think they’re smart. I think they’re just selfish assholes.
Time and time again, I come across the argument that “it will make the price of everything to up because now businesses have to pay workers more.”
Ok—so? Businesses are forced to pay workers to a standard that allows everybody to live without drowning in debt and inescapable poverty. Isn’t it a good thing that people won’t be suffering?
No, not to them. Their wages won’t increase equivalently, and now they have to pay more to maintain their standard of luxury. It’s wealth redistribution away from those who can afford excess towards the people who can’t afford basics. They actively choose not to support that because it’s a personal inconvenience to them.
It’s an amazing demonstration of “equality looks like oppression to the privileged” and “fuck you, I got mine” attitude.
What? Anytime I see Mamdani posted on FB half the comments are saying NYC is gonna starve and communism doesn’t work and rich people will just leave and we need the rich to create jobs etc etc
I specifically said excluding corporate mouthpieces.
Yes. If you surround yourself with chuds you are going to hear chud talking points.
Not sure why you are bringing them up here.
They are bringing them up as a direct response to someone asking about them.
Lol glad to see someone can read a comment chain.
Some people really seem to have trouble with it lmao.
Probably because they are voters.
Even if you don’t get it - start at $30 bucks. The current is $16.50. If you get negotiated down to $20/hour you just gave every body on the bottom a more than 20% raise. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect New Yorkers to live on $40k/year but it’s a hell of a lot more reasonable than $33K/year.
I understand why minimum wages need to be monitored closely, and doled out with forethought and compromise. I get that raising up the bottom very suddenly tends to just be accompanied by price increases that ultimately still benefit the wealthy.
But it’s also just true that feeding money into the bottom of the system always pays greater and more impactful dividends than trying to somehow feed even more to the top. It’s been proven time and time again, and yet we’re always told it’s pointless to try it this time, because Rich people will just find a way to get it back. Duh, that’s what Rich people do. They use their advantages to gain more advantage. But the more people’s hands that money flows through on the way back to the wealthy, the better off we all are.
If it gives the poors a choice, the rich can’t have it.
You let those bottom 20% climb out of poverty and suddenly gain a choice in where they work/shop/spend their sudden disposable income? Well that might lead to demands of quality products, equitable availability and pricing, and less money for my cash stack throne!
They’ll ignore the mountain of starved child carcasses if there’s another 100 on the stack.
If you get negotiated down to $20/hour you just gave every body on the bottom a more than 20% raise.
This is such a toxic pov
The people who complain about higher minimum wage are the same people that also complain about crime and the unhoused. What if you simply paid more in taxes and then some of these problems were alleviated? What if public transportation in the US was just way better. Shit this became a fuckcars ad lmao.
Arts disingenuous.
Many small businesses struggle with labour costs. What needs to go hand in hand with an increase in wages, is a reduced cost of business focusing on real estate.
There’s ways around this but what is needed is reversing the syphon of money to billionaires and trillion dollar organization
which would have to be approved by lawmakers
I foresee checks and balances working as designed, protecting capitalists’ profits and shielding them from paying a livable wage, again.
And the more people who try this, the more it makes said lawmakers look bad. I’ll tell you one thing. We certainly aren’t going to accomplish it by not trying. So I say let the man cook.
Fully agreed. Even exposing people to these ideas and trying to partially implement them is a good thing in every imaginable aspect.
Mamdani ONCE looked at A Nazi Tattoo through a WINDOW! We HAVE to Vote for Donald Trump’s Sexual Deviant friend INSTEAD!
I’ll believe it when it comes into effect. That’s a lofty promise.
It isn’t a promise to raise the minimum wage. The mayor doesn’t have the power to do that. It is a promise to push and lobby towards that goal.
For a supposed democracy, Americans really tend to gravitate to a single source of power (king, dictator) mentality.
As usual ml has a bad take on how America works.
You can rag on .ml all you want, but they’re completely right on both counts in this case.
You’re completely dismissing a valid statement because of where it’s coming from.
So your take is that a mayor has the power to single handedly change the minimum wage? We elect people into a system of supposed checks and balances where the executive branch leads only with the support of the legislative and judicial. We do not elevate rulers. Supposedly.
Back to your ml cave with you
Stimpy, sometimes your wealth of ignorance astounds me.
Dont care, ml
That literally is how America works, or is supposed to. We elect people to make these policies and laws on our behalf, or lobby for them if their position doesn’t directly allow them to. Mamdani is not running for emperor, he is running for mayor of NYC. Mayors do not create federal or state law.
If you don’t understand politics, you should educate yourself on the basics before you go off and look like a jackass. There is literally nothing wrong with being silent and humble until you understand a topic well enough to speak on it.
I don’t think you understand if he doesn’t lie he won’t get in so it’s justified for the greater good!
Ron Pearlman voice: Politics. Politics never changes.
Yeah people will cheer this because it’s their team doing it.
I mean, it’s a better promise than the “woman won’t be human beings” rules the other team wants. I’ll cheer for it, I’m just skeptical.
Yeah you’re not wrong there.
Current NYC minimum wage is apparently 16.50. So a 1.8x increase over 5 years (how long are mayors for in NY?).
I… my inner labor 100% supports minimum wage increases. My inner realist understands that has a very substantial impact on businesses and tends to result in fewer employees doing more work (and rapidly getting them salaried so that overtime doesn’t exist). Which has a net negative impact because now one person is getting paid a living wage rather than two people getting paid enough to live in a closet in a flat.
Which is why, like most things, the solution is to decouple life from work. Universal Basic Income is what we desperately need. It resolves the minimum wage issue AND automation. The former because Fred’s Khlav Kalash
KCorner isn’t destroying their margins to have more than one person working the counter and the latter because… we are RAPIDLY reaching the point where jobs permanently go away (see: Tech). And it actually fulfills the capitalist dream where the people working (because they want additional spending money or “to have a better life”) actually want to be there.And… I kinda think that is less of a pipe dream than a first term mayor managing to increase minimum wage by 1.8x in 5 years.
I’ll also just add that NY, like much of the modern world (not just the US), is largely driven by commuters. People who wake up in Jersey or on the outskirts of town, drive in at 3 am, and then are part of the team that open up the shop at 4 so that you can buy your bagel when you walk out the door at 5:30. And… in a lot of ways that 16.50 goes a LONG way once you get to a place with a semi-reasonable cost of living… that said workers have difficulty enjoying because they are getting back home with just enough time to eat a meal and then go to bed.
Which is a very different problem and also why this kind of rubs me the wrong way the more I think about it. Don’t get me wrong, there are LOTS of people barely existing in NYC. But a lot of them are people with REALLY good jobs who just still live in one of the higher cost of living places on the planet. Not so much the people getting minimum wage to make their coffee.
has a very substantial impact on businesses
It has an impact; not a substantial one. Of course businesses will complain. They don’t want to pay workers at all, let alone fairly, but the only real impact is a slight reduction in profits once.
We can argue on what you consider “substantial” to me. We can also both just walk away and whack it to Sailor Moon hentai. The latter might actually be a more productive use of time. Err, also let it be known I am referring to Queen Serenity or whatever since I just remembered most of the sailor scouts are teenagers and that makes this joke real fucked up.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, it does have an impact on businesses. Moreso small businesses than the megacorps.
Like… it is generally common knowledge that most restaurants fail in the first year and a large part of that comes down to wages and profit margins. Ignoring the hell that is tip based economies for the moment (they still factor in to a minimum wage increase but at a much lower rate), wages come out of revenue. Revenue is based on price per meal. If wages increase, you either pay out fewer hours or raise prices.
Which… does get to the tipping side of things. EVERYONE fucking hates tipping (except for the workers who work it). But the people arguing that we should just bake that into the price are quite often the same ones arguing that everything is getting so expensive. Like… no shit?
Because, at some point (essentially microeconomics at a scale where it sort of works), you can’t raise prices AND you aren’t selling more hot dogs. Same with trying to run a hardware store that has to compete with Amazon and Lowes. And you very much CAN see that over time where minimum wage goes up (good!) and you have more and more restaraunts and local hardware stores with fewer and fewer staff. We all hate the idea of waiting 5 minutes for someone to come make a key but… that someone was busy mixing paint and searching the stock room for that color of doorknob someone needed.
Which, again, is why I am a firm believer that the goal needs to be UBI and we need to decouple work with life. It obviously needs fine tuning so that there will actually still be people willing to do those deeply shit jobs but we also need a way that isn’t just a constant cost of living loop.
Look, I’m not going to deal with all that gish gallop nonsense. I’m just going to say that there is no proof of a causative relationship between higher minimum wage and any particular business failing.
That’s just Fake News and I am going to continue living off vibes
Well, thanks for being honest, I guess?
You’ve done Duane Gish proud.
1.8x increase over 5 years
12.5% annualized
Yeah. To me that sounds insane (especially if you are getting the increased passed annually rather than all at once but scheduling the bumps) but, like I said, NYC is weird in that the inflation loops tend to be much more delayed. Or, I guess, have already gotten so fucked that it doesn’t matter as much that the staff at the smaller shops that are increasing prices to increase wages already can’t afford the stuff they sell.
I’m used to discussions and campaigning for even single digit percentages being A Thing.
I don’t know about NYC, but the Federal Wage has been stagnated so long, that 12.5% annualized increase seems like the BARE MINIMUM workers deserve.
I’m in Arkansas, so 30$/hr is probably a little “too much” here, but I believe in a the minimum wage should be a living wage at 40hr/wk.
Oh. There is VERY much a big gap between what people deserve and what they get (and where that money should come from but…).
My point is more that if you tell the average voter you want to raise the minimum wage by 10%, you get some knee jerk reactions that almost immediately translate into calls to ALL the representatives.
I don’t think that’s right. The average voter wants the minimum wage raised by quite a bit. Capital voters paint nightmare pictures no matter how small the increase is.
There is a pretty good It’s Always Sunny joke about how they are pro mental health but anti taxes an it more or less loops around until they decide the important thing is a new stadium for the Eagles. It is a disingenuous comparison but it also kind of sums this up.
People are, by and large, pro minimum wage because even the chuddiest republican knows how much those jobs tend to suck. Just like people, by and large, want to get rid of tipping and just bake a cost of living into the price itself.
Then you put it up for a vote (either just as legislature or as a proposal for the general public). And you suddenly see all the people who realize that money comes from somewhere will lose their god damned minds and start finding excuses.
There are definitely ways to sell it but it is always an uphill battle.
I’m all for increasing minimum wage, but I get annoyed when people put specific dollar amounts into legislation. They should base it on like cost of living or some index of generated profit.
% of profits is the best way to deal with it.
Nah, profits can be manipulated. It’s percent of revenue. Like, the CEO could pay themselves the entire profit and say “whoops no profit.” I also think the highest paid person should not be able to make more than ~10x the lowest paid person. So if there’s a $30 Per hour wage, the highest paid person could not make more than $300 an hour, or ~$624,000/y
Only problem is that cost of living problems are world wide and not just NYC.
He’s running for NYC, not mayor of earth. Someones gotta start it.
Yeah hopefully it’ll be him but I have my doubts looking at his list of promises.
I don’t see him implementing all of his policies, but then I’m not afraid of he actually does implement some of them.
Its the problem Democrats (and other left leaning parties) fundamentally have.
Right wing supporters more or less want nothing to change outside of the right people to suffer just a little bit more. So if their candidate hurts the wrong people? Whatever, they looked black enough, it’s still good.
Left wing? We actually want something. But what we want varies drastically. You want a focus on healthcare. I want UBI. Fred there… doesn’t give a shit about trans people but DOES want lower taxes. And so forth.
And that is the problem. If people vote for a candidate because they want X and don’t get X? It is a rapid trip to “my vote doesn’t matter” and “douche and a turd sandwich”. We saw a lot of that happen with Biden and Obama where people outright ignore the good they did in favor of the good they didn’t do.
So its a balancing act. Promise big so you can get votes but not so big that those voters get disillusioned. This very much seems like the latter to me but I also know that NYC is REAL weird economically so it might actually be feasible since the folk buying those minimum wage fueled services tend to have “real” jobs.
Yeah. I also feel like there is a push by some conservatives to leftists to have this view. Don’t participate in elections, just protest in a specific way that we can film to distort your arguments to our audience.
Yeah. It is why I very much side eye the people who feel the need to talk about how the most pointless and milquetoast of things are “better than nothing”.
The reality is that people only care so much for any given set of indignities. And most people are perfectly happy to equate “I marched with Dr King” and “I only watched a little bit of Twitch during the boycott”
“This attempt to help some people doesn’t solve everyone’s problems everywhere all at once, therefore it’s not good enough!”
This is an excellent example of twisting someone’s comment around enough to get angry at it instead of trying to understand it.
Only problem is that cost of living problems are world wide and not just NYC.
Literally: “the problem [with the proposed action] is that it only applies to a specific area and not the whole world”
I didn’t twist anything. Your comment doesn’t contain any more nuance than that.
It’s like trying to solve inflation by solving it in NYC.
It’s still a start, and it has to start somewhere. It absolutely will not be passed at the national level before it’s passed anywhere else.
