ATLANTA, U.S.A. – Career website Zippia created a map of the living wage in every U.S. state. Using MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, Zippia calculated how much it would cost to support two adults and one child in each state. The results, unsurprisingly, varied wildly. Washington D.C., Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York proved to be the most expensive, with minimum incomes ranging from $59,128 to $68,000. By contrast, in the least expensive states—Kentucky, Arkansas, and West Virginia—you can support yourself, a partner, and a child for just under $45,000.
Here is an ensuing conversation about the two working paradigms of economic thought underlying the vast disparities across states in the USA and also between the poor and the wealth.
Akosua: It’s amply interesting when I read the comments (American comments, I mean) on such issues as a “Living Wage”. One shinning example of American frugality (neoliberal economics) feels that a family of 6, with a home and two cars, really only need 29K to “get by,” he said: “Its a specious list. My ex-wife and I got by in Illinois with 4 kids on 29K a year almost half of what they list. This list has a pretty clear agenda.”
When he’s challenged on the idea of “getting by,” which is what he feels he can do without much contribution to the tax pot used to build and maintain public spaces, he reveals what he really wanted to say: “I couldn’t even begin to explain the concept of privatizing roads and how that would lead to better roads at a lower cost to the public with these people.”
See? This is what I call a Debt economy – a sufficiently rich neoliberal idea. We used to be scared of the (neo)-conservatives. Now we are faced with an equally brutal opposite. It may be true that in the short term, privatising every facet of public life might be good business. Of course, I stress, “good business.” But it is not good economics, especially in the long term. We can change governments! We cannot change the owner of a company!
Kwadwo: Very true. But most of us don’t necessarily easily get the nuance as we are more likely to decide based on what we see/feel than how it actually came about. The US system is a debt-driven economy based on making it easy to mask an illusion of wealth or better life thrown to the “middle class” which is usually defined to mean; a spouse, two to four kids, a house in a suburb, a nice car and twice a year of vacation all funded by debt not real incomes. In my personal view though, this debt-driven arrangement which allows more “have-nots” to feel the temporary illusion of better life is better than what I saw and explained in Europe which in many instances is still very welfare based.
Akosua: I will not condone spending beyond your means. Which is what both systems are. The US system, I feel, is particularly notorious because it rides on Debt. With debt comes debt collection where the rich collect interests (unearned income) on principals. It’s a devastating neoliberal idea and has no basis in nation building. Why must we live in a nation if only that means we must all work to enrich a few?
The US system impoverishes the people and concentrates power in the hands of a few. The evidence is now clear. I feel that system is more dangerous than a system in which welfare benefits may have to be frugally tailored to fit income – where you cut your cloth according to your size.
Kwadwo: I share your opinion and fight that “battle” daily in my home made up of different cultures. Both the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives(two systems we are faced with in the US) are not different in practice though the propaganda around their verbiage is enough to trick most of the have-nots. The US system upon a careful review is an oligopolistic culture which only benefits the very few owners of capital.
Akosua: Absolutely. Neoconservatives use whiteness, carped in Exceptionalism, to propagate their economic doctrines. They are the new-age plantation business owners in the US. The neoliberals, who are wandering business portfolios without an interest in nation building, use this to their advantage – they are promulgaters of the New World Order. In the same carping vein, they stress diversity and play ethnic politics in order to fool the minorities who they “use” to sway the vote. In the end, both voters who believe in whiteness and those who believe in human diversity, lose. This is the shining inevitable end of democracy as we know it – two extremes with confounding, yet often intersecting agendas.
Kwadwo: Bingo!!!
