I retired and move to the Cape this past winter. “Help Wanted” signs began to pop up a few weeks ago to the point where it’s odd to see a business without one on their door or on a road side sign. From what I gather, part of the problem is so-called “affordable housing”. Well, yes, if employers are not offering wages that will sustain the living costs of employees, specifically due to the high cost of housing, blaming a lack of “affordable housing” is one way to approach this. The other is to expect the employers to offer higher wages that will sustain an employee who is paying fair market prices for lodging.
Government intervention into the labor market to fix market flaws, specifically the employers refusal to offer fair market wages, is something that right wingers and conservatives should be against. If I can’t find anyone to wash dishes at my restaurant for $18 an hour, any believer in “free markets” would tell me to offer $20, or $25, or $35 until the market dictated the cost of a dish washer. Somehow, those on the right are silent about this government meddling in the free market, but there are more than enough on the left who reach the same conclusion from a different angle. If the market will pay a non-college graduate $35 an hour, then it must be that a college educated worker merits deserve more, the market be damned. Only college educated or those with unique skills deserve $75,000 a year! After all, anyone walk walk off the street and wash dishes, so it cannot pay well, according to their paradigm.
From my perspective, the rich are the ones who benefit from “Affordable Housing”. It allows them the luxury of externalizing the true costs of the labor that supports their service dependent lifestyle.
I suggest that instead of “Affordable Housing”, local towns and municipalities enact wage laws that tie the minimum wage to local housing costs. A dishwasher in Orleans should cost the restaurant owner and its patrons a hell of a lot more than a dishwasher in Holyoke.
I was a big believer in YIMBY and zoning reform, but I gotta wonder if it actually tackles the problem. One of our favorite diners in Boston just got gentrified into a five story housing complex and in theory that’s good from a YIMBY perspective since it’s more utility for the land etc. Yet none of the units seem particularly affordable, neither do most of the apartments sprouting off Route I, including the complex I used to live in.
So I do wonder what the best solution is. I lucked out that I’m now renting from family (although the family rate in this area is higher than the market rates of friends living in Chicago, Maine, Texas, and Nashville). The other reality is many places around here already are offering $15-17/hr. Including notorious McJobs like Wal Mart, Dunks, and literally McDonalds.
So it does seem the national chains are recognizing they need to pay more to be competitive in this area. I wonder how that affects small businesses like the Italian cafe near my house, which has enjoyed awesome business despite the pandemic, but seems to be struggling with staffing. It also seems that bars and restaurants are struggling with staffing. I used to be anti-tip, but students surprisingly insist they make more money with the tips and rejected my argument for a living wage during a recent economics discussion. However we solve it, the status quo is not sustainable. Not for our region or our country.
The government solution to provide “affordable housing” in cities did nothing but provide enclaves of indentured servants to work the menial jobs servicing the rich people in the cities. When occupants of affordable housing show some initiative and increase their income they’re no longer eligible and get kicked out of their home.
Do you think the solution to the problem is to pay the landscapers on Marco Island $150,000 a year so they can live there? Robotic lawn services, restaurants, trash collections are the future. The most popular bartenders on cruise ships are giant robotic arms.
As far as tipping vs minimum wage of course your students want tipping. Providing uncounted cash for outstanding service is an introduction to the way the world works that is a lesson that all kids should learn early on. It also is aiding and abetting tax evasion so for everyone who bemoans that Bezos doesn’t pay his fair share, look no farther than your local diner.
I don’t see the free market solution working either, as we seem to be built out in the Boston area. Even if we get rid of the NIMBY zoning laws, a big if, I don’t see how it drives the cost down to affordability.
It’s not just the low income folks, it’s folks like my household, 150k d.i.n.k, still can’t afford a 5% down payment on a decent house in a decent neighborhood anytime soon. Or I suck it up and endure a 60-90 min commute, which won’t be good for my health or the health of the planet. It’s a tough nut to crack.
This isn’t going to be solved by tinkering with zoning laws to encourage “market-driven” mechanisms.
Your household is being strangled by the wealth concentration that is destroying our economy. I suspect that the effective federal tax rate of your household was more than 1% last year. Sam Walton — among America’s wealthiest individuals — paid an effective tax rate of 1% on his wealth increase of TENS of BILLIONS of dollars.
The wealth taxes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders don’t go nearly far enough. This problem will only be solved when federal, state, and local government begins taxing wealth at an “erosive” rate.
We should impose wealth taxes at rates high enough that ten years from now, our wealthiest households (I’m talking about the ultra-wealthy at the very top end of the wealth distribution — a few hundred households at most) have LOWER net worth than they do today.
That is the only mechanism that is going to actually end the suffering that you and your family are currently enduring.
You are repeating tired GOP canards that have no basis in fact and have been refuted by actual data countless times.
To wit:
“Show some initiative”? You repeat the offensive canard that being squeezed out of today’s by-the-wealthy and for-the-wealthy economy demonstrates “lack of initiative”. When was the last time you looked at actual data about the demographics of who lives in affordable housing today?
Do YOU think the solution to problem is to slash taxes even more? Do YOU think that the successful GOP program to defund the IRS helps or hurts?
You might try reading the current reporting documenting the way that our tax and regulatory systems are designed by the very wealthy for the very wealthy. Look at the effective taxes paid by the 25 wealthiest Americans and compare them to your own. Sam Walton paid an effective federal tax rate of 1% on the tens of billions of increased wealth he received in the past few years.
Like so many other GOP adherents, you prefer to make snarky comments about “landscapers on Marco Island” while overlooking the relatively handful of people at the top of the wealth distribution who actively create our current economic malaise.
This paragraph is perhaps the most divorced from reality. You demonstrate that your familiarity with the restaurant business extends no further than your most recent mailing from the GOP.
My oldest daughter and her husband own and operate a restaurant in Newton Center. They tell a completely different story from you — a story based on actual experience as both restaurant employees and now as owners and employers.
Your comment shows a complete disconnect between your beliefs and the current reality of the restaurant business in Massachusetts — especially in June of 2021.
Please don’t take my responses here as a personal hostility towards you. Your commentary is emblematic of a great many Americans who get their “news” from Fox and don’t realize the extent to which their own confirmation bias blinds them to today’s reality.
America faces desperate economic times. Today’s Trumpist GOP actively seeks to end representative democracy in America — the clear goal of their current state-by-state assault on local voting regulations is to allow them to reverse the result of the 2024 election if it goes against them.
America will not survive this if we do not demand that ALL of us deal with actual facts and actual reality rather than partisan lies and distortions from any quadrant of the political compass.
I worked for tips years ago and never reported it as income, it should have been. If I tip the starter and show up for my tee time now, he let’s me out early and I’m sure he doesn’t report that
.
Your experience from “years ago” does not make you knowledgeable about the restaurant business of today.
In particular, you show no awareness of the actual impact of the “tipped minimum wage” on either employees or employers.
Let’s try a little thought experiment.
Imagine I own a posh vacation villa on Nantucket valued at $25 Million that I visit each summer when I am not residing at my $25 Million Townhouse on Boylston Street in Boston. Yes, life is good.
Now let’s imagine that my wife wants to completely remodel the bathrooms and kitchen on Nantucket after seeing the custom marble work done at a friend’s villa nearby. The work was done by a team of master craftsmen from Italy.
When I received a proposal from the Italians, it included a surcharge – the cost of $75,000 to cover the added expense of lodging for the men at a local hotel on Nantucket.
I then lobbied the town/county/state to provide “affordable housing” for my team of Italian craftsmen to reduce that $75K down to $25K, even though I could clearly cover the all the costs on my own – but that’s not how the rich stay rich, eh?
Do you think its fair and just for the residents of Marco Island, with the average homes valued at $1.5 Million to pay $150K to get their property landscaped – or should the rest of us pay more in taxes to subsidize their lifestyle?
What if the residents of Marco Island, with the average homes valued at $1.5M, paid — choosing an arbitrary number — 25% of the increase in their net worth each year in taxes? This is the net worth as reported every month by the various financial firms that manage their portfolios (every such firm sends a statement every month). What if — even more radically — they paid a similar percentage of their total net worth (rather than the increase)?
Such an approach avoids any tax increases for “the rest of us”. Such a wealth tax would more then cover $75K of this example and would provide a livable base income for the landscapers. With such a base income, those residents who wanted to hire a landscaper might find themselves being required to offer significantly higher wages in order to for the landscapers to perform the hot, dirty, demanding, and often dangerous work.
Our economy generates more than enough wealth so that every American can make actual choices about what he, she, or they want to do with their time.
Guess I just don’t see any “economic malaise” bogging things down. Have you tried to book a hotel and get a rental car lately? The top 25 wealthy families aren’t driving them all. Houses are growing in value, should we tax the increase in the wealth all owners have experienced and share that with poor “renters” because that would be more fair?
It’s hard to get a handle on the real world from the 2nd tee.