Thats more of an SEP field
Ah! The Somebody Else’s Problem field! Someone actually knows it!
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one in the world who read the books.
A system’s function is what it does. He is invisible.
Full-time jobs that don’t pay a living wage should be illegal. No matter how “beneath” you the job feels, if we need someone to do it “full-time” then anything less than a full living is a rip off, and you have to either advocate for taxpayers to subsidize the employer’s greed or that they overwork to make a living.
It blew mi mind today when i read that people work at Walmart AND collect food stamp. What is even the point of working if you can’t afford to live?
That’s been known and publicly stated for what feels like a decade or more. Good to know NOTHING has been done about it.
I’m pretty sure its in Walmart’s on-boarding process to instruct new employees to apply to welfare programs. If your multibillion dollar corporation is pushing their employees onto government assistance than what the fuck is the point of working. You know that nothing you do will get you a better salary because they aren’t just doing this to you but thousands, maybe millions, across the US and globally. And the c-suite is raking in billions in profit that they squeeze from their employees. But don’t worry Walmart had a college repayment program so they are giving back /s
Their on boarding process 10 years ago also implicitly told you that they would fire you if you attempted to unionize, and even explicitly told you to report your coworkers to management if they talked about a union.
It’s extremely illegal, but I’ve never heard of them getting in trouble for it.
That’s because we gained workers rights by force and ever since: the elite have been driving us (the working class) apart from each other to make us isolated and powerless.
They have shut down entire stores that were trying to unionize.
Like Starbux, in its hometown.
Wait till you learn about how black people have been treated by the police and government officials it’s cold as ice. USA USA!
Low wages and poor labour laws actually make it so big corporations can indirectly profit off social programs:
This has been happening for like 30 years now, you just read about tris today?
One of the most utilitarian xkcds i know of. 10/10
Not only that, the other side is also that owning buildings as investments should also be illegal.
In my country buildings and flats appreciate at a rate of 6% year-on-year on average. Rent is only 3% of the value of that property per year, on average. So a landlord can take 9% and have to deal with renters, their demands and the risk of them breaking things, or take 6% and do nothing at all. Keeping properties empty and off the market is enriching themselves on the suffering of people who now don’t have a place to live.
So in my opinion there should be a vacancy tax that exactly matches the value appreciation rate of the property. Then landlords have the choice between 0% (=loss of money due to inflation) or 9%. And if they still don’t want to rent the place out, they can still sell it to someone who wants to live there.
That proposal would still keep renting out property as a profitable way to go, while also helping people who want to buy property to live there, and the only people who would get harmed by this are people who purposely take property off the market to create scarcity to enrich themselves.
I would add strict rend regulations. A one bedroom apartment should not be rented for more than 1/4 of minimum wage…
If you are not paying living wages for a full-time job, that means you are getting subsidized employees from the government.
part of walmarts onboarding process is how to apply for government assistance like snap
Assuming 25/hr minimum living wage: There are optional positions within businesses that are nice to have, but very simple, but can be opted to be done for any number of hours a day up to full time, and cannot be justified to carry 25/hr… You could have a company offering menial work on razor thin margins, but some people like working there, like scooping ice cream, which could not otherwise exist at 25/hr. There are small businesses that people want to work with that don’t make enough to pay everyone 25/hr (ex. some small gyms). There are cases where low revenue businesses could pay with future equity, but cannot afford 25/hr now. You have to account for these cases in your rules.
Then do universal basic income. Now people are free to spend a couple hours scooping ice cream without risking their safety. Assuming your basic income is enough to cover a dignified life
This is likely a reasonable solution.
You have to account for these cases in your rules.
Why? They can’t afford an employee. They shouldn’t hire one.
I think your hat smells really good…
Already explained why… Lots of positions are just nice to have, but are subsidized already, entirely, by other positions that generate all revenue. In many cases you don’t want the business to go away entirely, and in many cases the business wouldn’t even fail, you’d just end up with the optional positions terminated, so those employees make 0/hr instead.
Another poster already contributed a valid solution of UBI.
No you didn’t. You only said that a company that can’t afford “25/hr” would be unable to hire people at that rate. Plus an offhand comment about how some people working full time “cannot be justified” earning a living wage, that’s the point you seemingly want to make but just stating something isn’t an explanation.
You are both extremely bad at logic and math.
Commodity housing is a crime against humanity.
Buying homes to use as gambling chips is a crime against humanity
IMHO the problem is systemic. There are very few ways to save for retirement without economic rent. Landlords suck, and so does the macroeconomic policy that encourages becoming a landlord instead of just saving money.
The only reason housing, an otherwise depreciating asset, can become an investment is through land scarcity (to be solved with land value taxes) and through housing scarcity (created with policy such as height restrictions, “green” belts, and difficult building permit processes)
And all to have a few thousand extra billionaires.
Yeah, but maybe someday I’ll be one of those billionaires!
Then that’ll show someone like me!
You vastly overestimate the billionaire cast. As of April 2025, there seem to be 902 billionaires in the US. (I can’t access the original Forbes article, sorry).
Always love a good pedant.
But the exact number really doesn’t matter and isn’t the point.
Thank you.
I think the exact magnitude of the billionaire caste illustrates the magnitude of the point.
Well it kind of does. Less than 1k people is a lot easier to grasp than thousands for people.
I’m very worried I may appear in this comic soon. I hate being an American.
Land of the free, free to die on the streets
“But not these streets, we want people to come through here and spend money. Wouldn’t want to risk them seeing you and giving you that money instead.”
I don’t get it
Gentrification.
In some areas of the country, being homeless is a crime.
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY”
POTUS
You and me both. I have about two weeks left…
Hey at least you’re brave and free.
Feels like the problem is systemic and tied to the high price of real estate relative to the low price of wages.
Would be nice to get some kind of public officials involved. People genuinely interested in building public housing or, at least, implementing a citywide rent freeze until supply is released to match demand.
Millions of Homes Still Being Kept Vacant as Housing Costs Surge, Report Finds
The current system is broken fundamentally and cannot be fixed, because it was actually designed this way and is working as intended by all billionaires.
We are way past simple changes like that and relying on bureaucrats to do anything is just giving them time to make things even worse.
What we need is to send all the billionaires straight to giloutine, take their wealth, redistribute it and build a new system where no single person can have so much power to affect millions of other people.
History has taught us that the violent overthrow of a government, even a hopelessly corrupt one, never leads to a better state.
Yes, we need to strip billionaires of their power in the government. But we need to do it through laws and an orderly takeover of power through our electoral system. The minute we take up arms, things will go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye.
Of course, because no one should have opposed Hitler with force. Obviously this didn’t lead to anything better than the Nazi government.
Or no USSR republics should have fought to overthrow the Kremlin government and establish their own. Because none of those countries are way better off than Russia is now.
Or the French should not have tried to overthrow the broken and unfair Monarchy exploiting the poor.
In the same fashion, no one should fight to overthrow an extremely corrupt capitalist and cruel fascist government.
Let’s just hope that billionaires controlling the government will be nice to the poor in the next election 🤞🤞🤞
If anything, history has taught us the complete opposite.
Things might get worse in the short term, but sometimes a complete government overthrow is the only way to make impactful changes to a system that’s rotten to the core.
Poor North Koreans didn’t overthrow their government in time and now look at them. But of course, they can “vote” for a better government next time.
A rent freeze is decent, but what would really help is everywhere to implement caps on how much you’re allowed to charge for rent and utilities. Without those, then they’ll just raise prices by however much the freeze cost them. UBI will also be ineffective without it cause they’ll just raise prices by however much the UBI is.
They just announced that they’re raising water and sewage in my area by 300% by the end of the year. No reason given, just because they can. It should be fucking illegal. They’re also planning on putting in a few data centers, which are currently being hotly contested, because they’re supposed to make everyone’s electric bill go up about 300% as well. I’m terrified as to how I’m going to afford my electric bill. Water and sewage is included in my rent, I can’t wait to see how much that increases when my lease is up this winter and I also have no idea how I’ll afford it, but I also don’t know if I could find anywhere to move that would be cheaper and not give me a commute that negates any savings.
I mean, broadly speaking, you want staples and basic lifestyle needs provided at-cost by a public functionary. Leaving groceries and housing and health care and education to the free market has created enormous amounts of waste, a maze of barriers to entry, and ballooned administrative overheads.
Countries with much lower cost of living tend to be where utilities are owned and operated by the state as a social amenity, while luxuries and economic frontier advancements are left to private experimentation and entrepreneurship. But even then, the intention is to glean the wheat from the chaffe, incorporating the best of the frontier into the interior with an eye towards efficiencies of scale.
USA operates the exact opposite of this. We use the government to do the big things that aren’t/won’t be profitable immediately to set things up for big business to rake in all the benefits later by building their businesses on that foundation. Of course, all those business owners “did it on their own,” neverminding the fact that the ground they walk on only exists because of everyone else.
This isn’t theoretical. UBI has already been tested in real life, and rents do not increase as much as incomes do. This is because supply and demand are not perfectly elastic.
Rent caps are a great idea and would help, but they aren’t strictly necessary for UBI to be a net gain.
770,000
It’s an entire city.
If only we listened.
His Wikipedia page is interesting. He’s largely got left leaning positions but doesn’t believe in man made climate change and endorsed Donald Trump in 2015.
Wonder how he feels nowadays
On transgender people, McMillan says “When you see a guy walk down the street and he’s got a little skirt on, and he’s so happy. Why shouldn’t you be happy? This is America, it’s beautiful to watch someone different.”
Based-ish? He’s clearly happy to see trans folk be happy, but still adresses them by their former gender. His heart feels like its in the right place.
It’s much easier to change a pronoun than acknowledge that “those people” are people (whoever “those” stands for). Yeah, a small update would be nice, but it’s a good starting point
The manager of the 7/11 down the street from me was homeless. She’d finish her shift and go spend the night at a “pod village” the city had set up.
