The trouble, maybe the premier trouble with the American Dream, is we fail to see it’s not.
It’s not just the unemployed who are hurting.
Workers are barely scraping by on wages. A single person needs about $400/week pretax to pay bills, to eat. Tens of millions of American workers fall short.
Every day is a rainy day.
You’ll find many of them in food prep, where more than 11 million Americans command a median hourly wage of $8.24. There are another 4.5 million workers doing maintenance-related tasks for $10.18 an hour, 3.3 million in “personal care” at $9.50, and 14.5 million in retail jobs that pay $11.41.
The Bush Years: Meager wages pushed 6.2 million more Americans into poverty between 2000 and 2007. And that was before the banking industry imploded. More than 28 million people are on food stamps, up from 17 million in 2000. Republicans. Phooey.