It's all awesome to me, but yes - it's all disco.

You have moved on to an aesthetic argument. That's suitable for discussions about how you spend your own money, but much less so when we're discussing the public fisc. Sociey may owe everyone a life without serious material want, but it doesn't owe them an ocean view.

Zillow has many listings down below $58K, none of them for trailers - check out, say, ZIP code 39212. I suggested four people could easily live on a median salary, not minimum wage. And as far as livability goes, it's highly undesirable, but that is more or less orthogonal to the issue of whether or not you can live there.

The average rental cost you can find is - I'm guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong - derived from online sources like Craigslist? That's not the average place on the market, which has a lot of Section 8. As for used trailers, look at something like this to get an idea of what's out there. And remember that Jackson is one of the most expensive places in the state... if you really get out in the boonies and know how to fix your own stuff (a $1500 car can last a lot more than a year if you know how to fix it yourself), it can be insanely cheap.

I'm not worried about the consumer surplus - I don't care if it's zero, in this particular case, because it's not Econ 101 but actual people with lives that need to have meaning and purpose.

The effective result is that society decides that people shouldn't starve just because they're not economically productive enough to feed themselves and their progeny, and society should own up to its duties and pay them the difference. Otherwise, what's the difference between you and your supposed conservative archenemy? You accuse them of lacking community spirit, but you want business owners to pay people lots of money just because you say they should, instead of contributing a non-negotiable part of your own paycheck (aka taxes) to pay for the social outcomes you want. Yeah, Walmart and McD's and a bunch of other business get cheap workers. But the alternative to that is that they adopt a different business model that involves a lot less people - Walmart vs Costco. Sure, it's a lot better to be a Costco employee than a Walmart one, but there are a hell of a lot less of them.

Hahaha, how funny. It just so happens that I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and having family there still, I'm quite conversant with the local economics. I'm assuming that you got a median house price, or a median mortgage, of $58k from somewhere. That's not an entirely unreasonable number, but the distribution is anything but normal - it's at least biphasic, probably triphasic (large underclass, modest middle class, small upper middle class, tiny sprinkling of really wealthy people). In much of the city, a large number of properties that have been repossessed for taxes can't be sold because the simple requirement to pay up to three years' back taxes in order to take possession of the property completely eliminates the potential profit.

You can buy a habitable home in a not-so-great neighborhood for under $50k, or a used trailer for something like $10k. You can easily rent a 2BR apartment in a bad neighborhood for $200/mo. The people I knew didn't drive new cars, and if one died in a way they didn't know how to fix, they'd buy something for $1500, max. They also didn't pay anything like Jackson prices for housing.

Incidentally, since when is a minimum wage job supposed to support a family of four on one income? I said you could do that on a median income, or yourself pretty easily at poverty line.

I never asked for data, I asked for plausible arguments why, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing, we should stop at (say) $15/hr, or, more generally, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing for society, why should only business owners should bear the cost?

You are welcome to live any life you can afford, but if you want to idealize the 1950s as the height of worker power and complain that you can't live as well now as you could then, that's incorrect. You can. You just have to live like the real 1950s, not the ones in your head.

Decades? You think most of the people on here are under 25? This ain't Reddit. I'm in the original reader group and I'm 40... but plenty of guys here up into their 60s and 70s. Anyone over 80 in the audience?

And something like half the integrated circuit output of the entire world at the time.

Bottom-rung workers should be on welfare. The alternative to working + welfare is just welfare - and that's far more corrosive to society. You can't make a person whose market value is $8/hr suddenly have a market value of $15/hr just by raising the minimum wage - you just make them unemployable. (Before you trot out the studies that show that modest increases in minimum wage don't increase unemployment, please be prepared to discuss just what qualifies as "modest", and why the results shouldn't be extrapolated to mandate a $100/hr minimum wage.)

You're just redefining what constitutes a livable wage. If you really want to live like someone in the 1950's, you can still do it quite easily on the median salary. No meals out, a house that's ~1000 square feet for a family of four (share the bedrooms and there's only one bath!), one television, no cable, one phone, one car, no air conditioning. Mom makes about half the clothes herself. Dad fixes the car whenever something goes wrong.

Back in the late nineties, I knew people who had their lives whittled down to about $8k/year in necessary expenses, and that was with air conditioning and modern cars. That's a little less than $12k today, basically right at the federal poverty line. They lived out in the boonies in trailers, but they had dial-up internet (as nearly all of us did at the time), and they were pretty happy with things the way they were.

The Heathrow Express ia the perfect example of how to deal with this. Paddington wasn't close to my hotel, per se, but it was much closer than Heathrow, and the Express was much faster and more convenient than taking a taxi from the airport.

Haha. When I was in med school, we got a lecture on arthropod-borne diseases from the state entomologist. The botfly is not the only fly that does this, just the only one that does it commonly in humans. Wild animals at certain times of year have very high parasite loads.

Doctors cannot write off unpaid portions of bills as a loss for tax purposes. Don't confuse "writing off bad debt" (i.e., you'll never collect it, so quit listing it as an asset on your balance sheet) with "writing off taxes". However, should you wish to rapidly solve the problem of the uninsured seeking access to medical care, it would be a highly effective change in the law.

Quite a lot of them in the outer boroughs, just not in Manhattan.