> "I suggest you get out of your bubble" That's a rather aggressive and insulting way to attempt to make your point. Disclosure -- I am married to Dove. We l

> "I suggest you get out of your bubble" That's a rather aggressive and insulting way to attempt to make your point. Disclosure -- I am married to Dove. We live in 80219 [0]. Median income here is a little under half of the state average. More than a third of the adult population has less than high school education; less than one third has ever been to college. In the last four years, in addition to our nuclear family, we've had the following live in our house: - a fresh college graduate, working as a tutor in the public schools - teen parents and their infant; the mom worked at WalMart and the dad at another grocery store - my divorced sister and her elementary-aged son; she worked part time as a substitute paraprofessional in special ed classrooms - my sister who was doing just fine on her own until her building was bought out from under her, and couldn't find an affordable place where she was able to practice her religion (can't find roommates who keep kosher; here she has room to set up her own mini-kitchen.) My parents live one zip code over, in a slightly less poor but still very poor area. My mom works at WalMart; my dad is disabled; they also have two adult children and two non-relatives living with them, including one who prefers the pronoun "they" and one who goes by the nickname "Hobo Joe". Why am I saying all of this? Because this is the "bubble" we live in. And when well-meaning people look in from the outside and say "minimum wage should be a living wage" and "people shouldn't be able to be partially government-subsidized and partially earning a wage", I think they don't realize what that approach actually entails. It basically guarantees my mom would be unemployed and 100% on government benefits, because nobody is going to hire a 66 year old woman who spent 30 years out of the workforce raising children. It means that people like "Hobo Joe" can't get an entry-level job and are therefore going to live their entire lives on government benefits, instead of slowly becoming more independent. Yes, these people are screwed by the economy -- but trying to make entry-level employers like WalMart pay more makes them even more screwed. You don't help people climb the ladder by kicking out the bottom rung. You help them by making the transition from unemployed to entry level as smooth as possible, by making it so that a person can make a partial transition where they have a mix of both, and by eliminating "cliffs" that they have to jump over in order to improve their situation. [0] http://www.city-data.com/zips/80219.html http://www.city-data.com/zips/80219.html