It is that signal, but are we ready to pay everyone more, even for low-skill jobs? How much more is everyone willing to pay for groceries? How much more for health care?
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.
Exactly, wealth is being concentrated at the top to such extremes that there is no more excess money in the lower/middle classes to tap. So somehow or other the increase in wages will have to come from the wealthy, whether through intentional redistribution, market forces, or peasant uprisings. Likely some combination of all three.
Eventually it just becomes a physics problem. If $100 exist in the world, and one guy has $99, and you need to fund something that takes $2, you have to get $1 out of the rich guy somehow.
Your comment assumes that like energy, money cannot be created or destroyed. Which is false. Anyone can create new money by talking a loan from the bank.
However this point also helps your argument: When you borrow you pay interest to someone richer. In a sense a combination of whoever you sent the money to, and the bank.
My understanding is any loan from a bank creates new money. However not sure about the types of loans that poor people use such as payday loans and pay-in-4 services. Maybe that us too since an investor may use bank borrowed money to fund them?
Or devalue the dollar to the extent that $1 becomes $2. In which case, the person who holds $99 doesn't hold $99 as "raw cash"(nominal asset), but holds $99 worth of real assets. With this inflation or devaluation, his $99 will become $198 + delta. This delta comes as rent extraction from the ordinary people.
It's not only about the person cleaning the toilets, companies often have more than one employee that's paid too little.
Look at nurses for example: you need plenty of them in hospitals and nursing homes, they are (in my opinion) severely underpaid. Raise their wages by 50%. You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
>You can make an educated guess how that will influence the price of healthcare or living in a nursing home.
Based on the $49 charge for 5ml of sugar water to calm our newborn baby down so a nurse could draw his blood, probably not much.
(The nurse failed to draw his blood. After four or five failed attempts over several hours they eventually asked a nurse from the NICU to come over, who got it first try.)
The nurse is probably receiving very little of these $49. It's probably an inflated price charged by the hospital that is usually negotiated down to something reasonable by the health insurance provider. Similar to the discussion I had with my product manager recently: she can't expect that consultant to work according to the 100$ per hour that his company charges, because he is likely receiving a lot less.
That assumes that the employer is willing to lose part of their margin and doesn't charge it back to their customers. Maybe not on the current contract, but future ones.
In some places they may be highly paid. In many, they are not. I know this because of close family who have worked as managers of multiple hospitals and hospice that have extremely uneven pay scales even in a single region. You might even assert that the people with less pay have more/sufficient staffing on hand but you would be wrong. The amount of WTF/hospital in the US never ceases to surprise me.
That may be the case in the US, but not in Germany and Austria. Nurses are paid pretty bad, and, surprise surprise, they're having problems finding people to choose that career.
Yeah there's this huge demand, for which they blame blame the nurses "ungrateful snobs" or get upset that immigrants are hired "taking away our jobs" or...
I'm actually curious in what parts of world anyone would genuinely consider nurses to be "highly paid". The hourly rates for some types of nursing work can be quite decent, but still markedly less than what virtually anyone in IT with similar levels of experience would expect to receive. And it's often sufficiently physically draining that it's not feasible for most to work 40-50 hours a week.
Yes, if you can't painlessly absorb a 50% increase in most peoples' second biggest expense after housing, it's all your fault and you're just being a spoiled child. /s
The word "lifestyle" means more than beer, nice cars, and smoked-salmon-avocado-toast on vacation. It includes peoples' capability to invest in their future. I'm sure you can cite many examples of fools and their money being soon parted, but there are plenty of people doing everything right who are being screwed by inflation as well.
'The market has spoken, but suddenly we'd rather not listen.'
Your argument rests on an unspoken (and perhaps unrealized) premise that profits cannot be allowed to shrink; all costs must be passed to someone else.
Totally, but it's a society-wide conspiracy. You could try a policy proposal asking people to pay 22% instead of 18% of their income for health insurance, and 4% instead of 3% for long-term care insurance, but I doubt that you'll be very successful.
For most people here, that won't matter, because paying 50% more for groceries would barely be noticeable, and neither would 50% more for health care be. But for society at large, that would kill many lifestyles.