At the time of this quote, a “job” was still very different from what it is now. For starters, you could almost certainly live off of it while not going into poverty.
A “job” now will require as much time and effort, and often hugely inflated education requirements, while paying peanuts.
Also, fuck Ronald Reagan in the afterlife. I hope he gets rimmed by a sentient cactus for all eternity in his own personal hell.
The minimum wage in 1981 when Reagan took office was $3.35 or $6,867.50 per year. In today’s dollars, that would be $11.27 or $23,103.50 per year. When he left office at the end of 1988, it was $3.35, which in today’s dollars would be $8.66 or $17,753 per year.
In 1981, the poverty level for a family of four was $9,287, or 35% more than the minimum wage. By 1988, the poverty level had risen to $12,090, or 76% more than the minimum wage.
So you’re right, at the time Reagan was sworn in, the minimum wage was higher than it is today, but by the time he left office its value had dropped significantly. At no point during his presidency was a job guaranteed to provide a living wage, and he was the first two-term president to not raise the minimum wage at all.
He was a bad President and a bad person.
Why would you want to torture a cactus like that? At least let the cactus be ignorant.
In my headcanon, the cactus is happy à la Sisyphus.
Yeah I often talk with my wife how when I was young only freshly minted teenagers made minimum wage and if you came in on time and sober for your shifts you quickly got a token raise and continued to get one usually like less than a year timeframe. It would be like a nickle after maybe first big quarter one but it was there. Then like the shift manager of a fast food place was an adult who could afford an apartment of their own and a beater car. I was so unappreciative of the amount I got paid in high school in terms of eggs per hour.
I believe the best Reagan is a corpse covered in piss.
“trickle down economics”
He wasn’t wrong at the time. People supported big families off of one income. It’s also largely his fault that isn’t true anymore.
He was wrong. Jobs aren’t social programs, they’re things you do to contribute to society. I know that probably isn’t your point, but the quote is just anti-poverty fear mongering that doesn’t even make any sense when you think about it for more than two seconds.
Like, at best, you could read it as “people with jobs are better off than people without jobs” and like, yeah, no shit. Turns out you get paid for working, which tends to help the ol’ budgeting thing, but that isn’t what social programs are for. They’re supposed to set a baseline for everyone so that we don’t have things like rampant crime, desperate people stuck in dead-end situations, and people who are so unable to fend for themselves that they become a major burden on society.
Whatever you say, I’m just glad they finally produced a toilet that’s fun to use for the whole family.
Yes, may he rot in piss 🙏
Nah. I liked him near the end. He deserved senility. I’m glad he had to suffer through that and I wish it had lasted longer.
I just want to point out that when he said this, minimum wage was a living wage.
So your full on minimum wage increase then to be a livable wage like it’s meant to be
Ah, so you support a new version of the Work Progress Administration, using government funds to guarantee decent paying jobs for everyone?
Sometimes I wish Marty McFly had made a side trip before leaving 1955 that second time.
“I was in a movie with a monkey, so I should be the president”
Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison parroted this a 2019, as a way to deny an increase in welfare payments:
“The best form of welfare is a job.”
At that time, roughly 540000 welfare recipients in Australia were long-term unemployed, as in they’d been unable to find employment in at least 12 months.
It clearly isn’t - there are likely more working homeless today than there were homeless in total at any point in Reagan’s presidency.
There were tons of homeless people during Reagan’s time.
He closed down California’s mental hospitals, promising that the mentally ill would be handled in the community. Without supervision they became street people. In the end, increased police costs of dealing with the homeless outweighed any benefit closing the hospitals could have had.
After it failed in California, he took it national.
The stupid thing is that back when that comment was made you actually could live off minimum wage, so they actually don’t even understand the context of their own post.
