Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.

Assuming 1 childless worker, got a list of things here (would like to know more about how these numbers were arrived at, but I’ll take them at their word).

Food, medical, housing, transportation, civic (apparently this is recreation etc.) Internet/mobile, and “other” (saving?)

I looked up an area near me. They give annual values, but I, like most Americans I imagine, can relate more easily to monthly costs, so divided everything by 12. So here’s what MIT says a “living wage” should pay for, per month:

Food: $406. That seems like a LOT for a single adult. My roommate and I spend less than this for the both of us and we buy groceries together, so I know how much our combined cost is.

Medical: $276. Can’t really comment in either direction about this, fact is that medical costs vary SO much from person to person, and even for the same person at different stages of life, that I’ll just give the benefit of the doubt that that’s the correct cost on average.

Housing: $1615. My rent is less than this, even if you don’t consider that it’s half of what it would be if I lived alone. I could see this being more or less accurate for my area for someone just moving in someplace.

Transportation: $897. What the fuck? If you have shitty credit AND you financed an expensive car for a shitty rate, then maybe, but NOBODY should be paying anything close to this a month for a car, even if you get gas weekly.

Civic: $251. That’s significant, $60+ every week? Doing what?

Internet/mobile: $117. That sounds fine, assuming middle of the road Internet and standard mobile plan.

Other: $368. What can you really say about “other”?

---

So, other than a few of those categories being WAY out of proportion imo, the biggest issue I see here is that MIT is giving different, separate “living wages” for 3 categories of people (1 alone, 2 with 1 working, and 2 with both working (why isn’t this just the first category doubled?)), and for 0 to 3 children. So, some issues I’m seeing:

1. It’s one thing to force a company to pay a worker more if they have a kid(s), and/or live with someone who doesn’t work, but you can’t force a company to hire these people. Considering that the value of the labor itself does not increase, this seems like it’d obviously create massive incentive against hiring anyone other than single childless individuals.

2. Typically an employer is not even entitled to know such personal details about a worker/applicant in the first place. But if we put these into effect, they would have to, in order to know which category you fall into, which leads back into 1 above

3. There is a LOT of work that does not generate nearly that amount of value (in the case above, around $27/hour assuming 40hr work week) for the business, but are things the business can’t function without. It’s easy to say “if you can’t afford to pay every single one of these positions this living wage, then you can’t afford to be in business”, but the fact is that this would place huge obstacles in the way of a small business getting up and running to any real degree. Megacorporations have pockets deep enough to eat the cost though, and so they’ll become even better at driving small business to extinction than they already are, and hasten us toward a society where they’re the only real game in town. And I shouldn’t have to list the reasons that an ‘employer monopoly’ is a REALLY bad state of affairs for the working population.

---

“Just increase the minimum wage to a living wage” is not the ‘duh, just do it’ solution many claim it to be.