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Boo hoo. This is not typical, unless you're in the "dropped out of highschool, got pregnant, and/or been in and out of prison" crowd. I get that this does happen, but it's the exception, not the norm.
I don't normally agree with gbaji, but on this particular issue he's kind of right. I have sympathy for struggling Americans who are trying to make ends meet, but to suggest that there are absolutely no opportunities for them to get out of their plight is disingenuous at best.
It's anecdotal and my experience isn't representative of the entire population, but I was a high school dropout, having been kicked out of my house when I was 14 after I came out of the closet. It was a rough life, being an emancipated adult working at a restaurant as a dishwasher and trying to get by.
However, I am now 35, with a college education, sitting on a mountain of technical certifications, in charge of a hardware department, and it all started with a 50 hours of night school training at the local votech for three hundred bucks and getting my foot in the door at a company looking for temp workers for a big project. I don't buy a lot of the sob stories people have about not being able to do ANYTHING to improve their lives. You can study a couple hours a week and spend a hundred bucks on a basic technical cert, and then get out of that McDonald's job and into some temp work with minimal effort, and no need for a steady work schedule.
In fact, with the internet and the amount of free information at one's disposal (and everyone has access to a library) it's easier than ever to self-educate.
That's not to say I agree with the spirit of this thread and the attempt to pay workers less and justify it with the notion that adding kids will somehow magically fix our economic woes, because that's just stupid... but we can't just take a position that there is a certain subset of people who have absolutely no chance in this world and base all of our economic strategies around that.
Edited, Dec 5th 2013 10:03am by Torrence