I was with you for a while tooq, and then we diverged.
I'm in the boat that recognizes that while I may personally be able to get further ahead in life than others, and that many people in fact do make bad choices or have bad attitudes, that does not change the fact that there are millions of people who will never advance beyond minimally skilled jobs for various reasons, not the least of which being there isn't a white collar job for every qualified individual. Also, not every kid is born a rocket scientist after all. Some well meaning folks will never advance very far in their careers if for no other reason than their internal processor is an i3 while yours may be an i7.
How we as a society treat and value lower skilled workers is a reflection of our society overall. I understand full well that, for example, lifting the minimum wage to $15 has all sorts of unintended (and potentially nasty) consequences, but dismissing lower skilled workers as negatively and casually as you seem to have? Yeah, I can't quite go there.....
I am not dismissing unskilled labor but I if this is your lot in life (whether by circumstance or limits on inteligence and ambition) then don't expect much....and even if you are unskilled, have a lower IQ, aren't that ambitious.....it is still pretty darn easy to exceed minimum wage....just showing up gets you there most of the time. That's just the facts of life...darwin proved out survival of the fittest. While we as society are not and should not be as cruel as nature intended us to be, the fact remains that there are winners and losers....always was and always will. That is why we have so called safety nets, which btw if explored nets a life equal to a $40k take home pay for a family of four when accounting for the subsidies for housing, food, healthcare, cell phones, etc. Off topic but this far too much to be considered a safety net, but that is for another thread.
The other thing to note is that less than 3% of the working population makes minimum wage, which includes teens and seniors doing it primarily for extra money - so it is not like there is a massive majority and it supports the notion that minimum wage shouldn't be and isn't permanent. And people can live on minimum wage, maybe not as a single earner family and maybe not the way they would want to, but shouldn't that be how it is. Didn't jacob at ERE live on $7K a year.....minimum wage is $14.5k.
Also, the reason why minimum wage and low income people are an issue has nothing to do with government or corporate policies, it is because we are a consumer society that doesn't make shit anymore and overvalue buying crap but only if it is cheap and to do that it needs to be made in china or wherever by people making $3/day - this is what needs to change.
The fact of the matter is that we as a populous aren't willing to pay more for crap and in turn can't pay more to the people that stock the shelves for said crap.......we could stop buying crap but then that would result in a bunch of people not even having the opportunity of a minimum wage job.