If you live with your parents and you have no bills to pay, there is no reason to complain. Pocket money is good for a 14 year old kid regardless in my opinion. As others have stated; minimum wage isn't meant to support adults. If you're 30 and the only place you can work is Walmart, where have you been for the last decade. People like that should have figured something out a while ago. Now I understand, the struggle is real for some people. A college degree doesn't guarantee a living in 2016 but you have to start somewhere. The only few reasons I can think of someone not attending college or getting some sort of hustle is;
Teen Pregnancy
Incarceration
Drug Addictions.
I'll be honest, I didn't put much thought into this post so forgive me if I offended you.
All I'm saying is that if there's a will, there's a way. I'm getting a bachelor's in nursing and living with my parent's until I can afford to live on my own. Some people have it way harder, I get it.
As I've said before. I don't give a sh*t about the poor because they don't give a sh*t about me. In fact, they will be benefitting off me (indirectly)
Here's an example. Me and my mom live in an apartment that costs $1800 a month. Pretty soon it will be up to $2000.
The neighbors that live under me are a 50 year old woman who doesn't work and is on welfare, and she lives with her 19 year old daughter that works at 7-11. She is on section 8 housing. (gov't assistance). They smoke hella cigarettes and we have to deal with secondhand smoke.
My other neighbors are a black lesbian couple who also pay next to nothing. They don't work either and I think they collect disability because she has a handicapped parking permit.
Still, they don't do sh*t and they get the SAME APARTMENT as us for a fraction of the price, if any.
The poor don't give a sh*t. All they do is sit there and WISH they had more money.
Anyways that's just one example.
You're right about all this. I've seen it for myself, and these people are a disgrace. You're also right that they are not a small minority. Unfortunately, they force me to make my argument with a lot of caveats and hedges. Screw those people. There needs to be a much better vetting process where people who can work part time are forced to work 20 hours a week to get the other 20 in supplements, where people are forced to submit to drug testing before getting on welfare, where junk food and soda are banned, etc. We all agree on this. This is a different discussion.
My concern is for the person who is working hard, but momentum always seems to be going the way. Obviously the handicapped man or the IQ 75 man is an extreme example, but it's not just these guys. Not everyone is cut out to be a lawyer, pilot, or engineer -- wealthy jobs that require
real degrees and real expertise.
You guys are not accounting for the huge chunk of people in the middle who graduated high school, got a bogus degree at the insistence of their stupid boomer parents and advisers, and who are willing to work, but whose skills are moderate at best because they got meaningless degrees in liberal arts or business administration. What can they do with that heap of rubbish? An assistant managers position at a retail chain making $15 an hour is hoping for the best.
Moderately well-paying positions in the range of $45-60,000 a year are so hard to come by now, because there are boatloads of "qualified applicants" with the same bogus degrees all vying for the same positions, which are also getting smaller in number as they go overseas.
I have news for you, wages are going down across the board. It's not just the McDonald's employee with no skills whatsoever making $8 an hour. You now have standard 9-5 office jobs where college-educated people work directly with executives and VPs in the same building making $10 an hour, and they're busting their ass for it.
Sadly because of the bad apples (whose damage can be curtailed by more oversight over who gets what, because the minimum wage and welfare are a completely different argument) you are telling
average but honest people who are willing to work that they are not entitled to a dignified life.