Continue to get worse? Aren't poor people better off today than they were at any prior point in US history?
Are they?
Minimum wage jobs didn't keep up with inflation. College costs have skyrocketed so that path to get out of poverty is that much harder. Medical care is much cheaper for some but not for all, there are gaps in Obamacare and Medicaid coverage. Not all states implemented the Obamacare system in full.
And as they look around, they see themselves falling farther and farther behind the folks with the good paying jobs. A non-trivial percentage of the American public treat retail and food service workers like crap and management generally lets them, possibly because their management treats them like crap in a professional way. It's humiliating. Check out
www.NotAlwaysRight.com for story after story from the front line workers.
Even if they're better off, they're not
relatively better off because they're falling further behind those who are doing well. Think about it, we're able to make so much money we can retire in our 30s or 40s and many of these folks couldn't hope to achieve that on what they make, there just isn't enough income to save enough for retirement. I've been poor. We went without health insurance and just hoped. I don't have all my teeth because getting a tooth pulled was much cheaper than a crown. We were one injury or illness away from disaster. We had one paid for car until a bad mechanic ruined it and didn't own up to it. Then we had no car and not enough income to qualify for a replacement used vehicle -- thankfully someone co-signed for us. We got out of poverty because I wasn't born poor and had solid middle-class skills and a college education, and I worked 14-16 hour days 6-7 days a week for some years. It was brutal and not everyone can do that. And that was in the good ole days of President Reagan... Cut the earning power of minimum wage work from inflation and jack up the cost of school and medical care and lodgings and it's worse.
A minimum wage worker working 30 hrs per week at their job for 50 weeks out of the year (the rest goes to unpaid holidays and illness or a staycation) grosses $10,875 a month with no benefits. Why not work 40 hours per week, the lazy slackers, you ask? Ah, but that would make them full time and the employer would have to treat them like a full time employee. There might be paid benefits then, and that would NEVER do. So if that worker wants to work 40 hrs per week for an extra $3625 per year they'll have to get a second job and cover the costs of a second commute. Remember that article by MMM on the evils of commuting? Yeah, well, double those evils on poverty wages and think about that. Double commuting time and add in the wasted time between two shifts at different employers and then wonder why they don't have lots of energy left for improving their lot in life. And remember, this assumes that the primary employer will actually set a standard work day and work hours and stick to it -- lots of them change the worker's schedule around all the time. That makes it harder to find a second job and to work enough hours at that job and not to have to work them at crazy times of the day that interfere with sleep patterns. And it makes it harder to take a class at a school to improve their situation, too, assuming they could cover the costs of that school somehow. I had one employer back when I had those kinds of jobs that would make out the schedule
the day before. The day before! How the HELL is someone supposed to plan anything around that? I was lucky, I had FU room and board at my parents and they would cover the college tuition if I couldn't. Lots of my coworkers didn't have that luxury.
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And just to make things more dangerous, toss recently re-empowered bigots on the alt-right into the mix who are looking to start a fight and take away hard-won rights from others and things could get ugly.
And don't kid yourself -- some of those folks are looking forward to a war so they can go kill the libtards and the rest will be cheering crowds while others do it. These random alt-right nutcases who go on murder-sprees are the canary in the social coal mine -- there will be more and on a larger scale if we don't break the back of the alt-right propaganda machine. It's a machine that's funded by a subset of us rich folks who think that they can squeeze the poor and working class folks even harder for more money and more social control.
The way to stay rich and avoid violent reprisals against the rich is to make sure that anyone who works is prosperous and well-treated.