Wal Mart increases starting wage

[Brian37]

And that is the problem, you'd still be behind on that rate, especially if you have kids and the rent is higher if you have more than one room.

Yes! You have to buy here to control housing costs. Buying is cheaper then renting. Real-estate taxes here are reasonable. However, the state taxes they take out of your paycheck is outrageous! Three times higher than California. It's a great place to be rich but tough to work here.

However, making wealth is easier here because we are all on a island with needs. Tourists come here with needs. Providing needs will prosper you. This world is changing very fast which creates more need whether real or imagined.

I myself am cell phone free and have never owned one and am holding out as long as I can. But, that stupid thingy has changed everything! The everything it is changing creates opportunities that never before existed. Hawai'i is a great place to be rich and to get rich. For instance, if you can put in pools where basalt exists you got it made! There are just not enough pool guys here and they only provide the elaborate $120.000.00 pools and don't have time for a simple $50.000 project.

While I like the social stance of liberal states, it still amounts to workers in every state not having enough to make ends meet.

The only way you fix that long term, is to raise wages, keep costs of living down and middle class and poor taxes down. The only bracket that needs to be taxed more are the billionaires first, multi millionaires. I still cannot shed a tear for some asshole like Trump who won't end up eating cat food if he gets taxed more.

You get taxed less in Red States, but you also make less, but even there costs are increasing at a faster pace than a worker can keep up with. 

When you average out the gap in all states, it still falls relatively in the same range and it is still growing.

If one looks up the tax rate between 48 and 1980 it was far higher on the rich than it is now, and that high tax helped create the economic boom in that time.

But since Reagan, the GOP have managed to con people into thinking small increases and small tax breaks for the middle class and poor will produce long term gains. But those minor breaks get beaten and eaten by the vastly bigger corporate welfare and those big corporations STILL raise prices which eats up any crumbs they give workers. IT IS A SCAM and it always has been.

Silicon Valley in CA and Farfaix County in Northern Va where I grew up, are now TWO of the most expensive places to live outside say big cities like NYC or San Fran Even the well of in Silicon Valley see that, not just fast food workers, but even middle class teachers have it really hard and they bleed off workers whom move because of the cost.

Then what? You move to say rural Oklahoma where it is cheaper, but you also don't make as much? 

Even where I live in rural NC better paying jobs can require you to drive further. One of my mom's former Nurses whom worked at the long term care travels an HOUR each way to work. Even the poorly paid aids there travel from a poor rural county for an hour too. 

It's nuts. And even from what you are telling me, while Hawaii is a more liberal state, I couldn't live there on the jobs I had. I wouldn't even move there with what my mom left me because it would get eaten up quickly. 

I don't see how anyone working retail or fast food there survives. But I can say that about NC too.