If you're working for minimum wage your financial problems are yours alone

[initforme]

Once you are poor that's where you will end up no matter how hard you work. It sounds unfair but that is reality.

 

[owebo]

Once you are poor that's where you will end up no matter how hard you work. It sounds unfair but that is reality.

Says who?

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

Slavery existed because plantation owners were to damn lazy to do any work.

Slavery existed because the people with the power were cruel and inhuman!

Slaves existed because black overlords sold their brethren to European white men

 

[initforme]

Says reality.....american reality.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

Once you are poor that's where you will end up no matter how hard you work. It sounds unfair but that is reality.

Completely wrong. A desire for riches brings riches, but you must be willing to sacrifice a lot and take a lot of risks.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

Your boss didn't kill your ambition.
Your boss didn't make you fail your education.
I didn't kill your ambition.
I didn't make you fail in school.

If you're an adult working for minimum wage it is YOUR irresponsible choices that led you there.

I wonder GrampsM, if slavery wasn't illegal would you also be the guy making threads about how being a slave is your own damn fault?

You are a fucking idiot and I welcome the moderation. Fuck off

So you wouldn't? Right?

So there you go, you are in perfect position to understand why some wouldn't want near-slave wages to be legal.

It wouldn't matter. Many places can't get Americans to work for the minimum wage now.

I doubt what you say but if I were in their shoes I wouldn't blame them. Did you know that in the last thirty years 86% of all the increase in wealth went to the upper 1%?

The poor bastards should either organize a union and sit down or just quit doing a damn thing. The rich can't do shit without a bunch of poor and average people working for them. Most rich people have trouble wiping their own asses.

In a free country, you can be whatever you desire. You don't have to be poor and you don't have to work for minimum wage your entire life.

Immigrants come to this country barely knowing enough English to get by with ten bucks in their pockets. Yet through a lot of hard work, some get educated and get good jobs. Many work night and day to save for their own business; some even buying into franchises.

But native born Americans just can't seem to figure that out. Why?

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

I believe in govt assistance for anyone working 40 hours per week for minimum wage. One cannot survive on that or pay a bill.

Sure, depend on government instead of working more than 40 hours. That's the American spirit!

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

Well ray in my life I was fortunate snuff to be able to walk off of 3 jobs...right into better ones...without notice. I simply didn't show up. That was a truly truly awesome feeling. Great great great feeling. Ecstasy.

Yeah, I know how you feel. I did the same thing when I was a kid. Walked off the job and told my employer to go F himself.

It took me two years to find another full-time job. In the meantime, I had to work at temp agencies and drive a roach coach which paid less than minimum wage to earn references enough to get another real full-time job.

That self-gratification did feel good, but the next few years of pain made me learn that instant gratification has it's costs.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

Says anyone with half a brain cell. Its good to see those jobs unfilled. If businesses struggle to fill positions that is good.

That is correct, it is good, because if they can't find labor, they need to increase their wage offer without unions and government regulation. That's the natural supply and demand process.

But as long as we keep letting foreigners into this country to take our jobs, that will never happen.

 

[Campbell]

I believe in govt assistance for anyone working 40 hours per week for minimum wage. One cannot survive on that or pay a bill.

Exactly! The goddam rich Republicans are the only ones who even give it a thought. I'd like to see how that bunch or elitist horse's asses would make it on what they pay their drivers or gardeners. They'd more than likely load up a .38 and blow their fuckin' brains out......if they could hit their heads.

 

[Ray From Cleveland]

I believe in govt assistance for anyone working 40 hours per week for minimum wage. One cannot survive on that or pay a bill.

Exactly! The goddam rich Republicans are the only ones who even give it a thought. I'd like to see how that bunch or elitist horse's asses would make it on what they pay their drivers or gardeners. They'd more than likely load up a .38 and blow their fuckin' brains out......if they could hit their heads.

Your comment takes me back to something my father told me when I was a kid.

If you give a poor person a million dollars, chances are, they will be poor in just a few years. But if you take all the money away from a millionaire, he will become a millionaire once again because he knows how he did it the first time.

Wealth is not for everybody. In fact, books have been written on how lottery winnings actually ruined people's lives.

 

[Flopper]

Your boss didn't kill your ambition.
Your boss didn't make you fail your education.
I didn't kill your ambition.
I didn't make you fail in school.


If you're an adult working for minimum wage it is YOUR irresponsible choices that led you there.

well, do you argue that their choices up to that point have something to do with where they are now?
For example, If instead of going into the navy and earning my degree when I was 18 I had decided to stay home and party like my friends did. Would I still have been retired from one good job right now, collecting a retirement that is honestly more than according to statistics the average person makes working, and working at a second career now that again pays about twice what the average national average is for yearly income. Or would I be like them and still working for the average yearly income with no expectation of retiring until social security comes along.
At the time I made that decision, any of my friends could have done the same, and ended up the same as me some 40 years later, but their decision 40 years ago is why they are not in the same position as I am.
Ive never worked harder than any of them, I dont think I have had as tough a job as some of them, but the degree and the initiative puts a lot of weight behind you during your working years.
Yes, for many their bad choices are why they are minimum wage workers today.

Just looking for bad choices a person has made as an explanation of why they are a failure is really not very helpful, to the person or to society. Only when we look for root causes of those bad decisions do learn what can be done to prevent them.

Except we do nothing to prevent them anyway.

In a way I consider myself fortunate due to my upbringing. I was raised in your typical two parent family household, went to church on Sunday, went to a Catholic school most of my life, had a stay at home mother in case I got into trouble, a situation many of us had years ago as children.

My father played the major role in teaching me how to work. He was a bricklayer and I started working with him at the age of 11 years old. During the summer evenings and all weekend, I would carry clamps of bricks to my father, mix cement, fetch necessary tools to keep the job going, and coming home a filthy mess from head to toe. He paid me one dollar per hour.

My father had a full time job as a bricklayer which is why I mostly worked with him in the evenings when he got home, had dinner, and we headed to a side job of his. As I got older, I was able to produce more work and got raises from my father, but very little raises at that. My parents seldom just handed over money. You had to do something for it in exchange.

Kids raised in single-parent households didn't have such upbringing. Yet who besides Republicans promote two parent families? In the black community, the out-of-wedlock birth rate is over 70%. Nobody seems to want to do anything about it. So of course those kids know nothing about working until they quit school or graduate and get their very first job.

If most of the failures we have been discussing had your family background, they would not be failures. Solving the problems of education, drugs, crime, mental health, unemployment, dependency, and economic growth all starts with the child and the family. Fix that and you fix it all. Unfortunately, solving social problems are the most difficult problems a nation faces. Our social welfare system is not geared to fix the problems, just maintain the status quo. The Left and Right are so far apart there really isn't much hope at the present time.

I disagree. I want to take you back to the Republican debates for the presidential nomination involving Newt Gingrich. Newt understood that not all people are college material. Our education system should teach children about manual labor--especially those who were brought up in families I just mentioned.

He was heavily criticized by the left for expressing the opinion that kids should work. They brought up slave labor, child labor, working for next to nothing, the whole ball of wax. I agreed with Newt because when I was a kid in school, we had such a program. Instead of sitting in useless study halls and gym, we were allowed to work at the various schools in the area and actually earn our first paycheck. I had to wake up extra early, go to a school, empty out trash cans, raise the US flag, burn the trash I collected, sweep the halls and so on.

Yes, kids should work and kids should study and parents should not expect their kid making C's and D's to go to college but all this does not address the underlying problems. Unless we address the underlying problems, nothing will change.

If kids are to do well in school, the first requirement is self esteem. They have to believe they can or they won't try and they need encouragement from parents or those that fill the roll of parents. Parenting classes for single mother should be a requirement for any financial support. 50% of the childcare between the ages of 2 and 8 consist of caging the children in cribs, playrooms or planting them in front of TV for most of the day. These years are the most important years for developing self esteem, learning the basic skills needed for school, and developing social skills. Fix the young kids and we'll fix most of America's problems. Ignore them, and problems will get worse.

 

[easyt65]

Your boss didn't kill your ambition.
Your boss didn't make you fail your education.
I didn't kill your ambition.
I didn't make you fail in school.


If you're an adult working for minimum wage it is YOUR irresponsible choices that led you there.

You DO know that thete are highly intelligent college graduates who can not find work because there is none, right?!

You do realize that through masdive overregulation, fiscal irresponsibility, poor policies, and legislation that has not only made it easier to take jobs out of the country but they have all but forced some companies to do so, right?

 

[JustAnotherNut]

For minimum wage employers don't expect productivity...so its fair. Low productivity low wage. One works as hard as they get paid.

That's not entirely true. Depending on the job/employer pay isn't always based on productivity. There are some that any raises given are given to everyone based on a pay scale for the type of position held and length of employment.

I believe in govt assistance for anyone working 40 hours per week for minimum wage. One cannot survive on that or pay a bill.

Usually minimum wage jobs don't offer 40 hours per week anymore. Most are only part-time.

 

[Maryland Patriot]

For minimum wage employers don't expect productivity...so its fair. Low productivity low wage. One works as hard as they get paid.

That's not entirely true. Depending on the job/employer pay isn't always based on productivity. There are some that any raises given are given to everyone based on a pay scale for the type of position held and length of employment.

I believe in govt assistance for anyone working 40 hours per week for minimum wage. One cannot survive on that or pay a bill.

Usually minimum wage jobs don't offer 40 hours per week anymore. Most are only part-time.

You have no idea what I would give to have a part time job for a month or two right now.
my hours for the last 3 months have been 65 to 75 hours a week, I have been working 7 days a week this entire 3 month period, I am typing this right now at 1:48am from my desk at work. Why you ask? because we are having a hard time finding people to fill the spots that we have empty right now for staff. The work is out there, the problem is that people are too picky. Yes I need to work and yes I want to work, but God forbid that the hours are on a midshift, or they include weekends, you dont expect people to give up their weekends just to have a $43.00 an hour job do you? that wouldn't be fair at all. So these positions go unfilled and people like me get screwed with having to fill in the hours.. on the bright side, thats roughly 30 hours a week of overtime. My complaints are fairly silent on payday.
I dont like these hours but the thought of being unemployed right now is not a thought that I entertain with much glee.

 

[martybegan]

I watched what happens personally when you flood the job market with immigrants.
Machine shops in Houston went from maybe 3% hispanic to around 80% hispanic in 25 years. As a result wages went stagnant and turned a once lucrative job you could raise a family on to what you have today.
I hear liberals crying about stagnant wages all the time yet they support the very cause of them.
Just how old are you?

You are full of shit. You don't know anything about the effect that immigrants have in our economy. You talk in talking points.

When you watch it happen it's hardly a talking point.
It was no secret that these immigrants were willing to work for far less than their American counterparts.

So let's send them back to Mexico, and let them make Carrier air conditioners and Fords and Trump ties there for $2 an hour.

Fuck the Americans who are too stupid to compete with them, amiright?

I'd rather spend my tax dollars on tax breaks and incentives to keep American jobs here than on welfare for immigrants who send a huge portion of their wages back to mexico rather than spending it here supporting our tax base and local economies..

Wh

People have life circumstances that sometimes leads to minimum wage jobs. And who's supposed to do these jobs? Someone has to do it. Working at a fast food job doesn't mean you have no ambition.

A lot of people work fast food jobs to put themselves through college or to take care fo family. Some people have a sick parent or sibling.

There are a lot of reasons why someone might work a fast food job. You need to pay them a reasonable wage.

"reasonable wage" is not something that can be imposed by the government, it is decided by how much value a person adds to a service or product via their labor.

Seems to me a reasonable wage is the wage both parties agree to do work at

Sure. And every unskilled worker has plenty of clout with which to negotiate a higher wage.

The clout comes from becoming skilled at something, or at least leveraging your good work at one unskilled position into a better paying one.

 

[martybegan]

People have life circumstances that sometimes leads to minimum wage jobs. And who's supposed to do these jobs? Someone has to do it. Working at a fast food job doesn't mean you have no ambition.

A lot of people work fast food jobs to put themselves through college or to take care fo family. Some people have a sick parent or sibling.

There are a lot of reasons why someone might work a fast food job. You need to pay them a reasonable wage.

"reasonable wage" is not something that can be imposed by the government, it is decided by how much value a person adds to a service or product via their labor.

"reasonable wage" is what it takes to pay the rent.
you shouldn't have to spend thousands of dollars getting a Bachelor degree to earn more than the minimum wage.

you don't need to. There are plenty of trade jobs out there for people with just a high school degree. However they require you to WORK, not just take orders and box up cookie-cutter made items.

 

[initforme]

"Wealth is not for everybody". Yup...only a few should have it. The rest should eek by struggling every inc. Classy.h of the way. Only in america will you hear this. Classy.

 

[initforme]

Working until the day you die is unacceptable and horrific. It should be illegal. It adds embarrassment to a life unenjoyed.

 

[owebo]

Working until the day you die is unacceptable and horrific. It should be illegal. It adds embarrassment to a life unenjoyed.

Says who?