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Comment by lenticular | Hacker News Reader

A few decades ago, you could support a family and buy a house on one income, with only a high school education. That is not remotely true anymore.

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Not true. You can go into the trades and make a very good living with just high school as formal education. There are plenty of software devs that never went to college. Plenty of people across the country do just fine on one income without college. The difference now is that somehow people started considering “fast-food cashier” as an actual “career.” Somehow every single job in America is supposed to support a family. That ridiculous. Some jobs are and should be “teenager jobs” or “extra money” jobs — not “support a family of four and rent an apartment” job. Minimum wage makes up such a small percentage of workers that it seems strange to expect those jobs to be able to support families and housing.

There's nowhere near the number of highly-paid manufacturing jobs anymore. You can make an argument that it's possible for someone to make a good living with a HS education if they play their cards right, but it certainly isn't as probable.

There just is nowhere near the amount of well-paid blue collar jobs, so there are not as many people getting those jobs. Simple as that. This is a big part of why income inequality has become bad. You seem to think that people have suddenly become much more lazy and shiftless than in the past, which is

But, when your union contracts use minimum wage as the base for their calculations, it's far easier to advocate for raising the minimum wage than it is to negotiate a higher multiple, etc.

The contract for the cleaners in my office[1], for example, starts its base wage calculations by adding $0.50 to the minimum wage. All the increases and adjustments begin at that number.

[1] http://www.seiu32bj.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2015-CAD-...

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