@VaBluebird I don’t want to get in a big argument about the minimum wage, but in my hometown it’s possible to buy a very nice house for $40-50,000. Because of the distress in the housing market I’ve even seen well-restored mansions or semi-mansions go for $100,000.
The rule of thumb is that people shouldn’t have to spend more than one-third of their income on housing. Well, a husband and wife making exactly minimum wage will have a monthly income of $2,513 a month. Of course, almost everyone quickly gets a raise to about eight or nine dollars, but we’ll leave that out.
But assuming we’re dealing with the one in a million couple making only minimum wage long term. The mortgage payment on a $50,000 house with a FHA loan is around $230 per month. With insurance and taxes that rises to about $400 per month. That is WAY under the one-third rule.
The point I’m making is that different parts of the country are different. If a person can live in relative luxury on the minimum wage, why should it be raised in that community? I can see an argument whereby New York City might need a minimum wage of $25 while rural flyover communities might need $5 an hour. Of course, maybe the government ought not set wages, but that’s another argument entirely.
My grandmother’s German potato salad is made with canned potatoes. My mom always served canned veggies – they were cheaper, and with five kids and an Army captain’s salary that qualified us for free lunch at school, we needed cheap. I could not wrap my head around liking a vegetable til I got to college and tried the fresh ones.
We donate cash to our local food bank and make food donations, too. After reading threads here, I have started donating more peanut butter, ethnic foods (there is a large Hispanic community here and the bank asks for beans and rice), and simple things that kids can prepare using just a microwave (or straight from the can) if a parent is at work.
In my hometown, you would have to spend ten times that much for a single-family home, and attached townhouses in decent neighborhoods are not all that much cheaper.
My husband and I should move to your community when we retire. The proceeds from the sale of our very ordinary house will likely be half a million. We could make good use of it there.
Setting up for my church’s harvest home celebration right at this moment. Someone must’ve brought food last week while I was on vacation or my organist was in to practice this morning. Among the goodies to donate to the food bank is a can of beans with a 2011 yes 2011 expiration date and a box of oatmeal packets closed with a rubber band. Apparently the donor likes strawberry and cream flavor because those two were removed and replaced with packets from another box that she doesn’t like.
guess I need to write a new sermon. Which could be illustrated well if the 5 1/2 year old bulging bean can could be timed to blow out in the sermon time!
You know, call me contrary but if the oatmeal is good, what’s the big deal if the donor took the flavors she liked and replaced them with other flavors?
And as someone who worked for a major food company for well over a decade, a lot of expiration dates are actually nonsense, and have more to do with wanting the retailers to turn over stock and consumers to discard what they have and buy new, than they are anything to do with food safety. If you only knew how arbitrary the selecting of the expiration date was …
Real estate prices of the rural Mississippi town a branch of my extended family sounds similar to @EarlVanDorn 's.
Retirement might be doable. Raising a family if one prioritizes having good public or even private schools nearby…non-starter from that family’s experience.
Experience in nearby local private school which my aunt/uncle later found was a former segregation academy with abysmal academic rigor* and finding not much difference in other nearby public/private schools was such they ended up sending one cousin to an elite NE boarding school and another to a regional Catholic HS which was a 2 hour driving commute each way.
One cousin said the level of academics at the nearby private school before he went off to boarding school was such it made the curriculum of an average NYC public HS look elite in comparison.
@VaBluebird My “hometown” is the town of my birth. I currently live 30 miles to the south, where housing prices are three or four times as high. Why? Because my hometown is full of poor people. Once my kids go to college I may move back home. It wasn’t always poor. A century and a half ago it was quite a wealthy place.
However, my point remains that different communities have different costs of living. In many places housing costs are quite low, and there really is no need for a minimum wage.
Maybe the minimum wage should come with a geographic adjustment reflecting the cost of living in different areas. Some corporations and federal agencies adjust their employees’ salaries to reflect geographic differences in the cost of living. The feds even do it for the amount their employees are allowed to spend for a hotel room when traveling to different areas for work. So the data to support it must exist.
but if the oatmeal is good, what’s the big deal if the donor took the flavors she liked and replaced them with other flavors?