The constitution says that everyone was born with certain unalienable rights such as the rights to life and liberty. Yet, at the same time, people are struggling to make rent, have no savings, and need multiple jobs just to get by. How can people possibly be living their lives, if they are trying not to be evicted. Survival isn’t the same thing as living. Living life could be so much more than scrambling to make rent every month. On some level, it seems most people understand this.
This is why things like get rich quick schemes have always been enticing for people. Some wonder how others fall for the get rich quick schemes. However, this is not a failure for the person that fell for the scheme, rather it is a failure of the society that allowed for that person to become desperate in the first place. The state of the American economy is such that many Americans aren’t living very full lives at all.
Core of the Problem
It seems the core of this problem lies within the minimum wage. These people suffer, those being , the people that are struggling to pay rent, because of an insubstantial minimum wage. What this means is that America, by allowing the minimum wage to be so low, is allowing people to struggle. If people made a living wage, then they wouldn’t struggle to pay rent, or struggle with student loans. A total of 21.6 million households now spend more than 30% of pre-tax income on rent. Some households are even paying even up to 50% of earnings on apartments, per Harvard’s research, according to Yahoo Finance. This is not a great indication of financial health.
Struggle
Along with the fact that many Americans are spending most of their income on rent and the necessities, Americans are engaging in side hustles and having multiple occupations. Multiple job holders reached 8,137,000 in March, or 5.1% of the total employed population, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s up from close to 7.5 million people during the same period last year, or 4.7% of the total employed population, according to market watch.
What this means is that people are both struggling to survive, and are working multiple jobs. This can’t possibly be the life or liberty that was intended by the constitution. It seems as though the current state of economic affairs is oppressing a certain section of the American population. Life has to be more than simply struggling to survive. Life has to be more than minimum wage labor.
Constitutional Change
How can people possibly engage in a fulfilling life if they have to spend their time going to multiple jobs and side hustles. What kind of liberty are people supposed to be engaging in, when they can barely pay for the bare necessities. How could these people possibly be pursuing any kind of liberty when they continue to work minimum wage jobs. However there may be a solution. One could use this grand argument as a reason for why the constitution should guarantee a living wage.
Guaranteeing a universal living wage would almost single handedly wipe out many of these issues. However there’s a few different ways to go about that. One could make every state apply a living wage for that state. Or, one could simply raise the federal minimum wage to a sufficient degree. either one of those could work. What matters most is that people have the ability to access the rights to life and liberty.
Written by Kenneth Mazerat
Sources:
YahooFinance: Harvard study: Why a record number of Americans are struggling to pay rent by Rebecca Chen
MarketWatch: More people are working multiple jobs as Americans battle inflation and layoff anxiety by Zoe Han
CongressionalCongress: Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights
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First Inset Image Courtesy of uusc4all’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
