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My daughter is making $10/hour at a part time job she has while attending
OSU.

My son made $9/hour painting houses as a summer job.

Both jobs pay/paid well above minimum wage.


Thank yoy for reinforcing my point.

Take your son, as an example. He was working at a skilled trade, and
paid at a rate that would gross him $18,000 a year if he worked 50
40-hour weeks.

It's a fairly safe assumption that your son got very few, (possibly no)
fringe benefits as part of the deal- so the employer's cost was
probably under $10 an hour with FICA, your state UE tax, etc.

What sort of lifestyle would 18,000 a year provide anybody?

Let's figure that after very minimal deductions for income tax and
Social Security, a full-time house painter in your community takes home
$1350 a month from a $1500 gross. If you have a state income tax, the
amount could be less.
(in reality, I bet there is very little exterior house painting done in
your climate for several months each winter, so the house painter would
be laid off and earning $zero- or probably working at whatever menial
task was available- for part of the year.)

From the $1350, deduct a flophouse rent. What is that in your area?
Let's say
$450 to rent a dirty little apartment in a questionable neighborhood or
to split rent with a buddy on a decent place. Down to $900 bucks.
Employer doesn't provide transportation to the job site so the
housepainter needs a car.
Figure $100 a month (average) in repairs to a wretched old beater and
50 gallons of gas per month at $3, and you're down to $650. Car
insurance would be another $50 a month, but the housepainter will drive
around without because he's got nothing to lose in a lawsuit and he
can't afford to take $50 out of his $650. The housepainter does need to
keep the lights on in his crumby little apartment and keep his cell
phone going so he can take calls from the boss telling him where to go
and paint the following day, so let's figure he keeps most of the
lights off most of the time and gets by for $100 a month in utilities.
Down to $550. A housepainter is going to burn up a lot of calories in a
day, so there will be some grocery expense each week. I think a single
guy can get by on about $7-8 a day if he eats a lot of rice and beans
and maybe some cheap ground beef. Down to $300 a month, so out of the
remaning $75 a week the housepainter needs to be totally responsible
for all his medical and dental bills, maybe put aside something so he
can take a college class once in a while and become better educated,
gawd forbid buy a ticket to a movie or a ballgame or some other
frivolous pastime once in a while, keep shoes on his feet and clothes
on his back, and, of course, save for retirement.

I wish him good luck.

Maybe after 40-50 years he can save up enough capital to start his own
business. Oh, wait.......he'll be 70 years old.......never mind......

Why can an employer, billing you son's time at $50-60 an hour or more,
get by with sharing only $10 (including taxes) of that $50 or $60 with
your son? It is precisely because that $9 wage *is* well above minimum.
Despite the fact that nobody can live any sort of realistic life on
$1500 a month these days, the fact that some jobs pay even less makes
it easy to fill a job like this with somebody trying to rise by their
bootstraps from abject and brutal poverty to a level of bare economic
subsistence.

Betcha a buck your son's employer thinks minimum wage is far too high,
as he feels the need to pay a couple of bucks an hour more in order to
attract adequate help. Betcha another buck he feels the "market" should
set wages, that minimum wage distorts the market, and that he thinks
his labor "costs" would be less in a "free market" environment. Few
people objecting to the minimum wage feel that it is artificially
*lowering* the cost of labor.



Pssst, Chuck............he is in high school. This is not a career but a
summer job. If he comes back next year he will be making $10/hour. The
3rd summer brings $12/hour. Not bad for a non skilled summer job. ;-)

And you made my point. If one chooses to skip an education in lieu of
taking a $9/hour job painting houses, that is *their* choice.

Now what is that saying about making your own bed?