HereForTheBeer: Re-run the numbers using "only" the ~1.4 million employed in the US and it still doesn't work - but it is closer, bumping the salary to around $35k. Really damn good for sliding boxes of Tasty-Os across a cash register. Cut the hours in half and still pay that much per hour and it's essentially the equivalent of making $70k per year were it a 40-hour week.
For working a cash register. Does that make sense to anyone? How is the local mom-and-pop store supposed to make that work?
But does it make sense for people to work full-time, while not even making enough to pay for decent housing and healthy food?
Mom and pop businesses continue to dwindle in America anyways, as the mega-corps like Walmart drive them out. They really don't even exist anymore in the larger ciites like where I live, except as specialty type businesses. I don't think the needs of a small and dwindling group of our businesses should drive our economic policies (though I would hate to see them die off completely and would love to see a comeback).
I do agree that simply raising the minimum wage isn't the answer. We need to think much, much bigger picture than that, when it comes to the economic realities of a future where less grunt-work, and even perhaps less "work" overall, is required.
Like healthcare, the burden of providing decent wages should be removed from the employer. And, like healthcare, it must become something provided by the society as a whole, for all citizens. Which means in the end, yes, the government would be responsible for implementing these things - single-payer healthcare and some sort of guaranteed basic wage.
But how would we ever pay for all that?? Quite simply, actually. It's just a matter of choices our society makes and political will. How about we simply tax all corporate earnings and income of the wealthiest (i.e., all the money going to the people at the top) at 50%, with no loopholes? Add that to the current tax base the rest of us are contributing and we're just about there. And if we come up a little short, perhaps we need to cut the pentagon's budget or find and trim other areas of excessive spending and/or waste to make up the difference. Or make that upper tax rate 60%. In any case, that kind of tax revenue that I'm talking about at least gets us in the ballpark, without having to significantly increase taxes on us "normal" middle/working class types.
And the increased economic activity from lots more people spending lots more money, once nobody is truly "poor" anymore, simply makes our corporate revenues, and therefore tax base, even yet higher. And everybody is happier and healthier to boot.
And who loses then, under this plan? Well the wealthiest folks take a serious pay cut. A 50% one in fact, because they pay close to zero in taxes, in general, currently. But thats it, they're the only ones that get hit. I think they can handle it - hell after all, 50% of a fortune is still a fortune, last I checked.... And we're just talking about future income here, not some true "redistributing" - this isnt hardline Marxist-Lenninist stuff I'm proposing.
This is the wealthiest country in the world, and we can use that wealth to do whatever we want. That's why its such a disgrace that we have poverty and so many "working poor" in our country. Because it doesn't have to be that way, its simply a consequence of the choices we make about how we spend our nation's wealth.
The problem is, under the current system, we "spend" most of our national wealth endlessly padding the bank accounts of the wealthiest.
There's a reason Bernie Sanders' ideas speak to so many of us. As we transition more and more away from the "grunt work economy", we are more and more going to need "Bernie-ish" ideas, or eventually we're going to regress completely to a feudal-like economy where a tiny elite class has everything and everybody else next to nothing. We're FAR closer to that now then when I was a kid in the 80s - our wealth distribution is already far more feudal-ish than even 30 years ago, and we will continue to go more and more in that direction as long as the current conditions continue. And we need to start thinking bigger picture than "Oh but this will hurt business xyz if we do this". That is paralyzing. We need to think about the greater good first and foremost, in order to adjust to the changes happening with tech, automation, and globalization, without it being a horribly painful and unhappy process..