For me to win, others must lose

Well, of course. They agree that someone has to do those jobs, they just don't think they should be able to afford a one bedroom apartment while doing so.

It’s wild how conservatives have been led to believe that people shouldn’t make a livable wage doing whatever job needs to be done.

Not just conservatives. My stepdad is far from being one, but he lives in a fantasy reality where "no one in the 80s made a living or supported a family working fast food or running a register." (I paraphrased a tiny bit, but this is a near-direct quote from him.)

This. My parents and my husband and I went to the Smithsonian archival museum in Washington DC. They had an exhibit about the coal and steel strike from the 1800s-literally present day. My parents were raised in the era of "work hard put your head down". They really needed this to show class inequality of capitalism. I mean you can find that anywhere on the internet but it was cool to be there and talk about it. Fuck Capitalism and the cancer that it has always been. My parents are still voting for Trash but I feel its a step forward.

Nobody wants to work anymore

I'm so fucking tired of hearing about a living wage.

I want a thriving wage! If that means that janitors and whoever the fuck conservatives want to shit on make $40-50 dollars and hour, so be it.

Wages have been so stagnant that I want a labor market and not a job market.

And, federally, it's still half that ($7.25). Cheers!

Maybe the movement should stop pushing for a number and just say you want a regulator who just increases minimum wage by inflation every year, as well as setting absolute minimum federal minimum wage up to a level where you can actually live.

But without asking for legislation that gives a regulator the authority to set minimum wages, even if you get $25/hr, you'll just have to get the movement going again ever few years.

This is not a novel idea by me, it's done all over the world.

The "fight for 15" movement officially started in Nov 2012. CPI calculator says that's $20.54 in today's money. But we all know housing and groceries have gone up significantly faster than CPI, and mostly just because the people controlling the supply decided they wanted more money.

Not just afford a one bedroom apartment. They should be able to do so and also afford to go to work. You can get housing for next to nothing in bumfuck nowhere, but if you can't get to work while living there, then there's no point.

Do you go out much? Most people treat their servers well regardless of political affiliation. My home town is majority conservative and are all very respectful when eating out.

Low wages would honestly be fine if everyone was guaranteed housing and food and medical care. I just want a society where a person who is lazy or unambitious or disadvanted who just wanted to take a year off could survive with some reasonable level of comfort without working at all if they didn't want to.

Yeah, make the employers compete against UBI. Can you pay me more to work than the government pays me to sit on my ass?

It's actually more like $25-30 now since we've been having this bullshit "conversation" for so long.

The common argument for why 16 year olds flipping burgers shouldn't make $15 / hr is that they don't have the same expenses as an adult, so they don't need that much, and it's so fucking wild to me that they'd use that. Clearly what you need doesn't factor into what people are paid in any other circumstance, otherwise the top 0.1% would be middle class, too. So why does it suddenly matter for that one specific demographic?