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Comment by DrSprout | Hacker News Reader

http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/09poverty.shtml

Poverty level for a 4-person household (which a single mother with three children would be) is $22,050/year. 3-person is $18,310.

50 hours a week @ $7.25/hr (federal minimum wage) * 52 weeks/year = $18824.

Although, good luck finding 50 hours a week of work in this economy.

And that only applies to US citizens. Never mind undocumented immigrants. (Though many do earn minimum wage and pay taxes.) Restaurants will often split low-income workers to avoid either restaurant giving them more than 40 hours a week, so they can avoid overtime and benefits.

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...good luck finding 50 hours a week of work in this economy.

First, I cited statistics from 2007, before the economy went down. Second, the statistics show that 80% of the poor are not looking for a job and that only 10% of them work more than 35 hours a week. Third, only 3.5% of the poor want to work more than 35 hours/week but are unable to find work.

Lastly, minimum wage is more or less irrelevant. Only 1.7 million workers (373k of whom were under 19) earned minimum wage or less in 2007. Assuming everyone earning min wage or less is poor [1], that's only 4.5% of the poor.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2007.htm

Also, to respond to a statement you made in your previous post: I work more than 50 hours/week, yet I still manage to find time to exercise and to cook healthy food. (Yesterday: work from 9 to 7, 3 hours of martial arts, dinner, work from 12-1.) If I can do it, why can't the poor?

[1] Teenagers earning min wage, but living in a non-poor household are not counted as part of the poor.

Let me start off by saying that I don't disagree with the statistics you quoted or your interpretation of statistics. I'm only disagreeing with what I quoted.

Cooking healthy food and practicing martial arts both come at a cost. This cost can be a cost in money, in time or effort spent, etc. In my experience, poor people usually can't afford that cost easily.

The monetary cost of running is about $100/year, biking considerably less. As for the cost in time, the average person in the bottom 25% of earnings spends 30 minutes/day more watching TV than the average person in the top 25% (2 hours, 6 minutes total). (No breakdown for "poverty" vs "non-poverty" is given.)

I think the poor could manage some exercise or preparation of healthier food if they wanted to.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm

Do you care for a family on your own? I'm talking about a specific class of people - primarily unwed single mothers - who do not have time for themselves. Their time is eaten up by making money for their families and caring for them.

Simply making the declarations that poor people don't want to work, and poor people are generally fat, even if true, ignore sizable quantities of people for whom exercise and healthy eating are not feasible.

You may be right about that narrow category. But there were only 4 million such women below the poverty level, circa 2007.

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