You will survive serious collisions that would kill in the Buick. You will ride more comfortably. Your gas mileage will triple the Buick’s. It will suffer far less rust.

Granted, you could sublet the Buick’s back seat and trunk to a young family starting out.

What’s it like now? Microwave fare delivered pre-cooked?

I made $1.75/hr in 1969, when Hires root beer was 99 cents a gallon, you could get a decent steak for 79 cents a pound, and cheap gasoline was 35 cents a gallon. Everything is ten times as expensive now. $20 is not hugely more than $17.50.

I bought a brand new 1972 Buick Electra 225 for $2500. Nowadays, $25K would by a low-end Toyota. The equivalent of an Electra would probably run a quarter-mil.

What you’re describing is why everyone doesn’t end up with a good job and a comfortable retirement. Childhood training, intelligence, ambition, local opportunities, and much more all determine a person’s path through life.

I’m one of three sons. We all were taught a work ethic and had opportunities to work at unskilled jobs. All three of us served in the miliary, where two of us learned our lifelong trades.

My younger brother served a single enlistment then struck out into the world. He held many different jobs but found it hard to increase his wages. Eventually, he got a job with the state and found his niche as an inspector of school lunch programs. He stuck with it and was able to retire comfortably.

Of the three of us, I was the only one to get a college degree, which improved my opportunities. My divorced mother was not able to help me, and I worked my way n through school. In the 1950s it was possible to do that, especially if you went to a state school without a big reputation.

My older brother served twenty-five years and was a Master Chief Petty Officer with major skills in radio, cryptography, and electrical work. After retiring from the Navy, he quickly found work in his field, and went on to a comfortable retirement.

Three boys, all from the same background, but very different paths through life. Too many people today don’t see the military as a prep school for civilian life. For every trigger puller you need four or five support personnel maintaining equipment, doing intelligence, providing logistics, serving food, maintaining bases, etc. Not only that, but the GI Bill will help put a person through school after an enlistment is completed.

I don’t see the military being shut down anytime soon. In fact, they’re missing their enlistment quotas.

When I was in high school, we were given aptitude tests to steer us in the direction of our abilities and interests. Thay helped me. I hope they’re still doing that today.

While I’m pointing out routes for success, we all recognize that many people will make bad decisions, poor choices, and make a mess of their lives. Our society used to be more orderly, more structured, with fewer drugs and bad examples to follow. Boy Scouts has been shrunken to a minor part of our society. It was a big part of my boyhood. It teaches morality and character. Churches are shrinking as well. Sunday School taught my brothers and I about right and wrong.

I’ve ramble d on here, but I think you can see that I believe there are some answers to the dilemma we find ourselves in.

How could anyone not realize that this was coming as a result of the law? Minimum wage law hikes tend to ignore economics but make those who support them feel good – at the workers’ expense.

Maybe because, politically, it’s a can’t-lose proposition for the Left. The politicians enacting the higher minimum wage get favorable media exposure, and the consequences get blamed on Greedy Businessmen Who Put Profits Over People.

I’m sure it makes it hard for small businesses– yet a local flatbread sandwich shop is only open for lunch. The owner has another shop in the next town and has given up finding reliable help– so she comes over and runs the place for lunch.

I don’t know what the answer to the bigger problem is, but I do notice that a lot of the native-born fast food workers are still young people. They aren’t as likely to be high school students anymore, but many of them may still live with their parents. Some may have disabilities and live in a group home. Others have roommates and many be struggling to pay the rent. Recent immigrants do seem to be taking more and more fast food jobs, though.

The typical fast food worker in the 50s and 60s grew up in a house with indoor plumbing, and when they came to work, they weren’t just flipping burgers, they also had the skill of showering every day, letting mom do their laundry, not making bad choices about the relationship between bathroom habits and food preparation, etc.

Economists put these workers in the same category as workers who aren’t as clean or smart as they were back in the day. So, instead of calculating the value of life skills, economists treat workers as if they were machines flipping burgers.

How much money and goodwill has Chipotle lost because they have had more than one outbreak of e-coli? Could this have been due to management there thinking food prep is about skills only, and not related to lifestyle?

Low paid jobs like food prep, housekeeping, home nursing, etc. actually require higher levels of personal hygiene and common sense than higher paid technical jobs. But due to the blind spots in how economics is done, wages are so low, only the least competent people in society take those jobs. Is this good for society?

There was a famous case years ago, where a nanny of a rich and famous media exec murdered his children. She made $10/hr. I thought at the time, maybe they should have paid a bit more for a sane person.

One more data point, I was staying in a lot of Airbnbs while traveling in Eastern Europe during Covid. Airbnb advertised that they would sanitize every apartment, included in maid service. And do you think it occurred to anyone to provide disposable cleaning equipment? No, housekeeping was going from apartment to apartment using the same mop and sponges. Bonus essay question: would it have helped if housekeeping were paid and trained better? How would this have affected Airbnb? Would a better-trained and equipped staff have caused Airbnb prices to go up? Should they have been replaced by robots, after dumping on them for not having better skills?

What would have been the affect on Bulgarian society if incompetent housekeepers were replaced by robots instead of being retrained? Good for Airbnb, bad for Bulgaria. The bell curve is here to stay, the people on the other side are our neighbors, better to invest in their skills than write them off as not worth the trouble.

To Obloody Hell, your suggestion that people supporting themselves with menial labor should go back to school, do you also believe the slogan about learning to code? How about let them eat cake? Some people will be able to go back to school while working full time, most won’t.

It’s actually fairly simple — if you don’t want to earn McWages, the answer is to have more than McSkills.

There are a number of avenues — not requiring high-priced 4y degrees — which earn far far more than minwage… for those who are physically inclined, Welding is a widely known Trade School talent which many can learn. If you are more intellectually inclined, there is a 2y program at any JuCo in nursing or paralegal. Even court reporting is a good way to make money in a short training time, and experience improves income quite a bit.

Yes, it requires you to knuckle down and work harder for a while as you gain the additional skills, rather than to couch-potato in front of an X-box or to party your night away. But this is how EVERYONE has historically improved themselves to make themselves eligible for higher paying jobs… from going to night school in the 1800s to become fully literate to taking classes part time at local JuCos.

In economics, this is called “delayed gratification”. And it’s how everyone moves up the ladder, even those who already make six figures, yet are not actually “rich”. You give up things now so that you will get more back later.