Andrew Rosenthal posts May 30, 2012 on The New York Times Opinion Pages the following:
“As part of its 2012 report on rent affordability, the National Low Income Housing Coalition released a chart that’s been floating around the Internet. It shows that there isn’t a single state in the country where it’s possible to work 40 hours per week at minimum wage and afford a two-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent. In West Virginia and Arkansas, you’d need to work at least a 63-hour week, and that’s as good as it gets. In California, Maryland, D.C., New Jersey and New York you’d need to work 130 hours or more. Hawaii comes in last place: 175 hours.
“I can anticipate a few no-big-deal arguments, starting with the definition of affordability. By “affordable,” the Coalition means paying no more than 30 percent of income for housing costs (rent and utilities). And why a two-bedroom apartment, as opposed to a one-bedroom?
“Both of these choices seem reasonable to me. Thirty percent is a generally accepted standard, and there are plenty of single-parent households as well as families where, for various reasons, only one member is able to work.
“But even if you quibble with how exactly the Coalition put the chart together, it’s clear that there’s a mismatch between the minimum wage and the cost of living (or at least a decent cost of living).”
This condition will worsen as ever-accelerating shift to productive capital continues––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production––destroying good-paying livable labor worker wages and/or steadily degrading the job earnings opportunity.
As productive capital, the non-human factor in production of products and services, is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth, therefore, it should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. If both labor and productive capital are interdependent factors of production, and if productive capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all.
In a democratic growth economy, based on binary economics (two-factor economics of reality), the ownership of productive capital would be spread more broadly as the economy grows, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent who now own 50 to 90 percent of the corporate wealth. Instead, the ownership pie would desirably get much bigger and their percentage of the total ownership would decrease, as ownership gets broader and broader, also benefiting the traditionally disenfranchised poor and working and middle class. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth and even benefit the already rich.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/paying-rent-on-minimum-wage/
