OK

regarding HOW PEOPLE LIVE AND WORK

61% paycheck to paycheck

First. These days too many people think they are entitled to their version of a WORK / LIFE BALANCE.

EXCUSE ME ! ! !

Then we have the all too typical """BLENDED HOUSEHOLD"""

Applying for an A rental property in. Strong A neighborhood.

3 or 4 BR. 2. Or 3 BA.

LETS SAY $ 4500. Month plus utilities.

By. The formulas it calls for household income of 180 to 216 k per year

Typical household today is 3 to 8 unrelated adults

Plus 1 to 3 unrelated kids

Plus maybe animals

Key applicant presents as making questionable verifiable annual income of 30 to 60 k,.....generally closer to 30 than 60.

One or more invariably doesn't work, and or is on some type of """assistance""" and or is self employed, a contractor , works freelance, works for cash, owns their own business.

They'd have no credit file, or a terrible one.

They do trust or believe in banks or credit cards

They have no cash reserves

They have the hard luck story

They are supposedly trying And just need a chance.

But they want to live in a really nice home in a really nice neighborhood

Because they are somebody and want to be entitled to be respected and are entitled to nice things and a nice home.

Thank you

Have a nice day !

,

Dave, you are right on the money. I use prescreening questions on inquiries so I don't waste too much time dealing with unqualified applicants. I would bet there are at least 40% who are trying to find someone to rent a place to them when they have little or no income, I'm talking about people like the guy that rolled silverware at a restaurant 2 hours a day 5 days a week for $12/hour, he was so proud that he had a job. That was his only income. How you going to make a $1200 rent payment plus utilities when you gross $480 a month. There are places all over town hiring anybody who can fog a mirror and the guy is only willing to work 10 hours a week but wants me to rent him a house. Sheesh.

Fortunately, being a red state we can still disqualify based on income source, police record, and pretty much anything else that is not directly covered by the HUD rules. I can file for eviction and have them out within 21-30 days. I can set the rent I want and increase as much as I want without having to ask the Government permission. The state's Supreme court even went so far as to ignore the Fed's eviction ban for several months.

MikeA, do you think that there should even be a minimum wage or laws for such?

My theory: low interest rates for the past several years, relaxed loan rules, and fear of rising rates propelled financially stable would-be-applicants into buying.

This fueled the crazy panic buying we saw.

This made our applicant pool lose these good candidates and left us with those who could not qualify.

Our applicants who pass screening are MARGINAL - 2 or 3 items on my checklist are not good or incomplete. Not bad, just not good enough.

The laws of supply and demand should win out. Right now the supply of labor is very tight so the current minimum wage means nothing, every entry position around here is paying at least $12 to start out but minimum wage remains at $7.25. When labor is not in demand the wages remain steady or go down. So what causes labor demand to be low? Temporarily it could be a recession, that's why we have unemployment benefits. Long term though we have seen it happen when our labor costs more than labor overseas +the cost of shipping goods. Jobs move from the US to China, Taiwan, Philippines, Bangladesh, etc. Once our labor costs goes down to a point wages stabilizes. Artificially, the US labor costs are driven up by corporate taxes. The cost of a product is comprised of Labor, Capital, Some overhead, some profit, and taxes. If the tax rate is high then products made here cost more. If it costs more then it fails here and moves where it is cheaper. When the production moves over seas there is a glut of US labor. When there is a glut of labor the price of labor goes down. When the price goes down it is cheaper to build in the US and the cycle starts over.

So, the answer to your question is no I don't agree with a minimum wage. Capitalism is what made the US the greatest country in the world, that means supply and demand. Second, give the US workers a chance and make the corporate tax rate as low as possible. That will lower the cost of goods produced in the US and drive up labor demand thus driving up wages (unless that labor demand is filled by people crossing the border).

The same argument here can be made about rent control. What happens when rent control goes into effect? It stagnates investment which makes the problem worse, causes deferred maintenance to increase, the quality of rentals declines, increases inefficiency (why rent 2 bedrooms when I can get 3 cheap), and ultimately makes the problem worse than what they were trying to solve in the first place. Just let the market set the rent and supply and demand will move it to the most efficient place.

Capitalism has been shown over the last 2oo years to be the most efficient method of governing which by definition raises the standard of living the fastest for those governed by it. Why would you abandon the basic premise of it which is the law of supply and demand.

6x6, I don't agree with a Federal Minimum Wage because what works in one state is way too low or too high in another. Even state by state things vary so much that a government mandate rarely works effectively. An employer will pay what it musts to attract employees. An employee will accept - or not - what works for them. Why is the government involved in that at all?

Ken, MikeA, and I are all on the same page regarding the minimum wage: it should not exist. In addition to the boom and bust cycle of labor that MikeA mentions, it causes permanent offshoring of many industries. The USA used to be a leading manufacture of clothing and other textiles, but then other countries got access to the machinery and with their much lower costs of labor, they whooped up in the international market. Looking at the tags on our clothing, most of us probably do not wear a lot of "Made in the USA" stuff, and if we do...we pay a premium.

Low cost labor jobs are also often a source of employment for low skilled workers, such as teenagers looking to build skills in their first jobs and/or people who lack the ability to advance into higher paying jobs. The term "ditch digger" was often used to describe folks who fit into this category, but that's not PC any more.

Finally, and fundamentally, it's an unjust (and should be illegal) infringing on the rights of W-2 workers that some people are exempt from. As a business owner, you can work for as little or as much as you like. If you make $20,000 per year but put in 70 hour weeks (70 * 50 weeks = 3,500 hours), that's only $5.71/hour. Perfectly legit. And some folks do things like this. My MIL crochets custom baby blankets for sale online, and we figured out that with the hours she puts in she's only netting around $5/hour after all expenses. She's perfectly happy to do it, though because she enjoys it and it makes her a little extra income. But if you do that kind of work as a hired hand for someone else, it's not allowed, even if you want to do it and someone wants to pay you to do it. How is that even remotely Constitutional, to say you're not allowed to trade your labor for less than $X?

For these reasons and all the others mentioned above, I believe the minimum wage should be abolished. Market forces and personal freedom should be the only deciding factors. We price everything else that way--Seller asks for $X, Buyer offers $Y, and we meet somewhere in the middle or we go our separate ways. Why not do the same with labor?

I'll say it again. I'm on another forum (non LL related) that constantly has tales of the under 30 set demanding to work between 10 and 30 hours a week MAX with no other income yet pull in 80K a year because of it. In my own case, my stepkids post on social media "how hard" it is to be expected to go to work every day and that the older generation "doesn't understaaaaaannnnnnnddddd because they had it sooooooo much beeeeettttteeeerr than we dooooooo." (insert whiney voice)

Dodge, absolutely there are factors that work against capitalism. We've already discussed wages, and you bring up corporate lobbyists which is a good one also, the socialist movements that are trying to put up roadblocks to corporations, the EPA, the DOL, the HHS, and there are others. All of those things chip away at capitalism, some more than others. Every chip is a little less efficient the laws of supply and demand works. All those things have one commonality. They are implemented in government. The challenge is to make government as small as possible with as few regulations as possible but still maintain things like safe drinking water (EPA) without going crazy and taking more chips than necessary out of efficiency. While we in the US are taking chips out of efficiency, so to are other governments. As long as the world takes roughly the same swipe then we are ok. Once another government gets much more efficient then they can produce things cheaper and they become the standard leaving the less efficient governments/businesses to fail.

My conclusion after getting 30 Zillow responses to my rental ad===many people have NO idea about money. The example===

I don't agree it's young people as many have opined recently. I find the young people I deal with to be very responsible. Rent paid on time, issues reported appropriately, thank you's a plenty...I'm quite happy to rent to young people.