That's some incompetence from the part of the responder. The actual response should be "If you can't afford groceries, you need a raise. Here's how I'm helping you get one."
The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.
A raise would be nice, I'm making exactly what I made in 2021. Wage growth for software engineers is stagnant because demand for senior software engineers has fallen off a cliff the last few years.
There's also an over supply of these engineers. The H1B program was intended to address a shortage that no longer exists, yet the workers and program remain, ruining the market for citizens.
Policy can encourage wage growth, subsidies can be given out, and politicians could increase both the minimum wage and public sector wages whenever they choose.
Honestly at this point we start getting into a long discussion such as benefits of unionisation and why we should support it alongside collective bargaining and the fact that rising the minimum wage floor raises wages of other low paying jobs.
At some point though I’m throwing academic sources to the voter at which point I’ve probably lost the discourse because it’s hard to reason about.
The reality is I don’t do any of the above. I’m not even interested in debating the point anymore. People don’t want to hear long winded academic discourse on the best economic approaches to anything.
I’ve bluntly completely lost faith in American democracy. The candidate with the biggest budget has won consistently and the biggest budget comes mostly from corporate donations via PACs.
I view this as the major contributing cause to the current situation. The cyclic dependencies among issues that need attention mean that explaining a fix simply and truthfully is no longer possible. In the current system, a simple explanation is a prerequisite for winning the votes to implement anything. Parties acting in good faith don’t stand a chance.
> completely lost faith in American democracy
Exactly. It doesn’t function without intangibles like “good faith” or “norms” which have been discarded.
I don't really know the details of the US election. But two things that I know are that Kamala couldn't be pro-union, what sucks for her, and Trump spent a really huge amount of time talking about ways to increase people's salaries that can't possibly work, but were actual proposals he made.
Republicans just voted down plenty of bills that would have raised the minimum wage in a few states, so I don't think you understand how incompetent republican voters are.
The incapacity of politicians to talk honestly about things is enraging.