I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.
The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...
A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year.
But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.
There are not really frills, but in terms of “have shelter and food” it can work. Not everywhere is SF.
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.
We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.
It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere.
> looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.
However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful.
Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
remove the elderly, those for who it would be illegal to work or still engaged in formal education, the so significantly handicapped no work is manageable.
So it is an age group, with caveats.
According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall.
When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics.
By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.
"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.
Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.
Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.
Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford.
LVT simply wouldn't be a good system, if applied in the real world.
It would screw everyone who already has a mortgage, though. You'd have to phase it in slowly.
We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.