Luxembourg has a system where not only the minimum wage, but all wages rise by 2.5% when the prices rise by over 2.5% over the last increase, from the lowly worker to the CEO of a company. This ensures that everybody has their wages rise in accordance to inflation (in addition to small rises the employer has to pay for staying with a company a set of time, generally during the first year and then every 5 years. This promotes loyalty to a company as your starting wage at another company will almost always be lower than what you got at your old employment) and that there are very few strikes from wages, instead they are to improve work conditions or to counter firings in the company most of the time here.

Our current minimum wage is 2171€ per month. In general, a full work month is considered 172 hours, which gives us 12.62€ per hour. That may not sound like that much, but consider that you are also relieved from paying any taxes, which means you get to keep ~1900€ net income each month, which is way above what most of our European neighbors pay. Also, keep in mind that this is the unqualified minimum wage, if you have specific qualifications (like a bachelor's degree for instance), your employer needs to pay you at least 20% extra, so at least 2605€ minimum wage (15.15€ per hour) even if your qualification has nothing to do with the job.

And to Americans who find those minimum wages quite low for a country whose GDP per capita is 70% higher than the one in the US, consider that they also cover your pension, invalidity insurance, healthcare and basic legal support in case of a dispute with your employer, things that you have to source separately from your income in the US.

Because every time we try to show someone else doing it better outside of the US, we get these dumbass people who believe if its not done in the US its not worth paying attention to.  I will be blunt that its mostly the GOP party and its why we do not have universal Healthcare, why we have outdate school systems, shitty as railroads you name it.  Its why we spend a 3rd of our budget on the Military but argue about any infrastructure change over a million bucks.

We really need to get these old as farts out of Congress so the country can actually move instead of the pissing game that goes on constantly.

I want a high speed rail network as well but politically and logistically it isn't feasible and by the time it becomes feasible it might be outmoded. if we can bypass that through hyperloop technology then I am all for it.

As I previously stated:

"If you are on the left, you need to be direct and precise with your criticisms of the left, else you just feed the Republican propaganda train. Wide, vapid and vague complaints about the evils of the establishment accomplish nothing."

And what do we have in this video? "Dems introduce embarrassing minimum wage bill". Not exactly the rational, pointed criticism of someone making a minor argument on the fringes in regards to the tactics of negotiations (while he does speak about negotiation, it is steeped in this broad, blind language to the extent that his "true" criticism is completely overshadowed by these unsubstantiated feelings). It is instead the language of grift, which needs to get clicks, so it opens with a clickbait and wide indictments of the party. Okay, so what about the actual content of the video?

"Democrats introduce an inadequate, and frankly embarrassing minimum wage bill." What an opener. Like, this motherfucker goes so far as to call this a "very conservative compromise". Fuck off with that. This is everything that progressive groups and worker's groups wanted for years. 

So what are his actual issues with the bill?

1) Median Hourly Wage Increase: I would agree with him here if he actually knew what the fuck he was talking about. If he wasn't such a brainlet, he would have realized that he even fucking read out loud that the figures that he was using were inflation-adjusted. This means that median wages didn't grow 15% in 40 years, they grew 15% on top of the inflation in that time period. Just to put things into perspective, if we look at the actual figures, median hourly earnings increased not 15% over the past 40 years, but roughly 250%. The percent increase using median hourly wage is higher than both inflation (obviously) and the measure of productivity that he provided. 

2) He presented no additional argument.

He has failed to present an argument about why this bill is weak, and just made a bunch of broad gestures about how democrats are bad when it turns out that this bill is actually real fucking good and this guy is an idiot. "Washington so disconnected", nah, this dude is disconnected from his brain. These grifter types will complain about anything, whether or not it makes any sense, because their audience is full of people who want to be mad at something. Just look at the comments. They are full of people who are mad at establishment democrats over nothing.

High Speed rail is just never going to get outmoded by a hyperloop. It's more expensive, slower, and carries less people. Let's go for the thing that actually works.  

California can't even complete its high speed rail project after scaling it back considerably. Then you have political groups like the Koch Brothers convincing people to vote against light rail systems in their own cities over BS reasons.

I'm all in favor of skipping Hyperloop and going straight to teleportation.

Then I stand corrected on this. Tied to Median wage increase might be as good as inflation. But it also highlight the absurdity of already having a minimum income that is not tied to either as of now.

This is beautiful.. Biden has put a freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, such a positive move by Biden, hopefully he will get around to freezing military subsidies to Israel in future.. first effort in gun control, but this time on a world scale ;)   

Looks like storming the capitol has some real consequences for the GOP. Thousands are dropping their party affiliation with the GOP and go independent or affiliate with the democrats:

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/536113-tens-of-thousands-of-voters-drop-republican-affiliation-after-capitol

And that's just from the couple regions which share such numbers, who knows how many there are nationwide ditching the GOP?

I made the conversion and it's $10.21 USD in Canada (well for Quebec at least) with projects to go to $10.52 USD.