Said worker is working 60hrs a week, and earning 20hrs of overtime. That's decent.

Unlike said worker, the CPA invested time and money into becoming a CPA. There's a 99% chance that the person in your story is untrained in his field, and never invested time, nor money, into a better education.

Doing 'much more work' does not always equate to 'getting much more money' - Why? Some skills are technical, and require a larger investment of time and money. Because of this, they usually have a much higher payout.

But if you want to pine about some generic worker - The generic worker could easily go out, and learn a basic technical skill like becoming a plumber or electrician, and earn $25-50/hr within a short period of time. Of course, due to poor decisions, this gentleman may not be able to do this. Choices are usually made that result in poor results.

Here's an example (real life example):

I have 2 friends that were barely making ends meet, driving up credit card debt, and not getting by. Both had to make the choice of doing radical things to work off their debt, or face tougher issues.

One of the friends started to put in extra hours at work, pay off debts, and learn a new, more valuable technical skill in the world of Affiliate marketing. In 6 months, he's gone from barely making ends meet to earning about $30,000 a month.

The other friend did absolutely nothing, despite warning, and has now lost everything he owns. He is probably going to be forced into bankruptcy, and is now living in my house, sleeping on my couch, because he can afford no better.

__

Which friend saught a better path? Which one didn't? I can assure you that in 99% of people's lives, good jobs don't come the way of the silver spoon, but through intelligence and comittment. I don't remember Bill Gates' family giving him the reigns of Microsoft saying 'here, run this for us'.

Even in my own life, I've sought to be the best, most competent worker for not having gone to college. It's worked out pretty well for me. I own 3 buildings with a total value of $400,000. Have a decent 5-figure in the bank account, am saving lots of money, and have a fantastic job. If I was ever cut from my job, I have the technical skills needed to find a new one in a matter of days, and have multiple fallback incomes. That didn't come by the way of a silver spoon, either. I was born into poverty, and had to make tough choices. I worked just as long and hard as the guy in your story - putting in 60-65hrs a week at a dead end job for $8.00 an hour (medical transportation officer). It was tough, but I knew I was doing that job just to make some money to invest it, and better my life.

Everyone has choices, what choices did the man in your story make? I'd really like to know. There's usually a logic and reason behind poverty. I have yet to meet a man I felt truly bad for, because of their situation. And if I did meet such a man, I would instantly hand them a check for $5,000 and look into providing food and shelter for them.

 For the average person you'd probably be right, but when you get to the wealthy and are dealing with caps on certain types of donations of around 50%, I could see it being beneficial to use

Also people are still focused on the wrong issue, its not about saying, hey this guys only gets 15 dollars for his work, there is always going to be low wage work that needs to be filled, someone will have to be the garbage man, at least until we can build robots that can do that work for us (untiil they rise up and slaughter us that is), so that shouldn't be the issue, there will always be someone making a minimum wage.  The issue should be what leads to the most productive society possible.

Odd that you think socialism leads to the most productive societies, when the least productive societies in history were all socialistic.

History doesn't mean anything to you?

Your right on. Nobody donates out of kindness or anything, its just the tax breaks. My dad doesn't donate to the foundation for the mentally challenged because his sister is mentally retarded...no its for the tax breaks. My Uncle doesn't donate to diabetes research because his son is diabetic, its for the tax breaks.

Come on dude most of the people either donate for random kindness or they know someone with a certain disease like diabetes, breast cancer, etc.

I couldn't have said it any better than this, kudos to you my friend.

       Well for one thing, he hit on one of his college professors, and as a result was thrown out of college.  He'd also been putting forth a lot of controversial ideas in his time in college that made some people that didn't want to hear them put him on their blacklist, so he's not really popular in the community where he lives, and he was raised in a very sheltered environment in a community where his family made quite a bit of money while almost everyone else in that community had very little education or were mainly on the working poverty line, so he never made many friends growing up (another part of the that was his dad was an alcoholic yet one of the most prominent people in his community at the same time, so the person was brought up to live in kind of a hush hush environment that further led to the separation that he had to put between himself and those others in his community.)  No one really knows him where he lives even though he's live there over 35 years, he has no references to put on job applications.

      Also, even though it is true that it is his fault that he was thrown out of college for the bad decision listed above, he was always brought up to believe that he would have strong family backing throughout his life and that he would always have strong family support and no real need to work for anything when he got older.  However, his parents got divorced, his dad married another woman, and had a heart attack a few years later and left everything to her.  And his grandparents that used to dote on him and give him significant amounts of money almost every weekend of his life died and their money went to their second son as he survived their first one.

The person I'm talking about didn't receive anything from those that he had been brought up to believe that he could always depend upon and he had none of the resources that formerly let him compete with the higher ups for the better things in life, so he thought how can I compensate for this loss, and decided to start playing dirty in certain ways to compete for the same quality of things that he had been led all his life to believe it was his right to compete for.  But the good or bad guys won instead.

Anyway after that bit of trouble he landed himself in he had great difficulty in finding jobs.  He did land a job as the maintenance man at a fast food restaurant but he primarily studied arts and humanities in college and after 30+ years of rather sedentary living where the heaviest things he generally lifted were video games, video tapes, and text books his body wasn't quite cut out for trying to be the guy that unloaded trucks and did the majority of lifting and cleaning at a highly rated fast food restaurant where maintaining those high rankings was really the only thing the managers and supervisors cared for.

I don't know if the sedentary lifestyle was entirely his fault.  He did have asthma that was originally believed to be cystic fibrosis by several doctors that may have led him to become lazy and sedentary  that coupled with the fact that there weren't many opportunities for him to play sports where he lived and where he didn't much feel like mingling with the other kids in his community after an incident where he was going to be in a church play when he was eight and on the way home he managed to say something about his father's alcoholism to the people that were bringing him home that day and he received a severe beating in the middle of the night that night after his mother told his father what he had said to the group of people bringing him home from church play practice made him a bit more reticent to speak to those in his community about himself.

Anyway, he did land the job at the fast food restaurant that I mentioned in the earlier post a few years after he was kicked out of the university.  But after a couple of years the early nineties luxury car that he used to travel to and from work each day wore out and he's been trapped in the small town he grew up in ever since then as he has no vehicle of his own and lives about 60 miles in any direction from even a small city. 

So your story, to sum it up, is:

Guy makes stupid decisions in college, punches his teacher, gets blacklisted, ruins his education, and is lazy and sedintary due to a medical condition. Has silver spoon pulled out from him, gets screwed by parents, and is forced to make ends meet on his own.

Correct?

That's the story of many poverty-line people, sir. I don't think you understand how often that resonates with various people. I've heard, and seen almost every story imaginable. People make bad decisions all the time. The thing that separates the winners from the losers are the ones that get back up, and try again, rather than sucumb to the mentality of mediocrity.

I must ask: Why didn't the person ever manage to even attempt a technical school that wouldn't care about blacklisted candidates? Why not learn something via self-teaching such as web developent or programming? There are many careers available that one can learn in their spare time, and may not even require schooling. You yourself said the gentleman was lazy. Should he be given a handout despite being lazy, or should he mire in his $8.00/hr job because he does not desire to work harder to learn a more solid career?

My own example:

I used to work for my local City Government as a Police Dispatcher. I wasn't very good at it, honestly. I moved into it from working as a part time employee for the city, as a parks & recreations worker (the very lowest of city government). Unfortunately, due to my performance as a Dispatcher, I was fired, and totally blacklisted from any and all city jobs - totally screwed out from my old job, too. Because of that, I had to scramble for a lower-paying job. Since I did not go to college, I was forced into an $8.00/hr job driving geriatric patients to and from doctors apointments. On average, I worked between 55-60hrs a week, which was incredibly brutal.

Rather than continue with the peon lifestyle, I had multiple choices on what I could do:

• Study hard at my current job, and become an EMT, earn $12.00/hr in a few months by giving up my weekends.


• Save up money, and go back to school


• Improvise and learn a new career from scratch.

I chose option #3, and began extensive analysis into the video game industry. I now work for a very large video game company as a business analyst, working half as long per day for twice the pay. Was I lucky? Yes. But I sacrificed my off time to better myself. As should of this gentleman. You forgot to tell me where he spent his hours away from the job. There are, after all, 168 hours a week. Even if he worked for 60 hours a week, slept for 40, and drove for 10 (1hr to and from work), that still gave him 60 hours a week that he could of been networking with others (despite his infamy), learning a new trade, or doing something else to better his situation. Because of not doing that, how am I supposed to feel bad for him?

Life is what you make of it. It sounds like, despite the bad things in his life, he still made very poor decisions with what he did. Yes, some things were environmental, but not all of it was. You said he began to do illegal things to compensate for a better life. We both know how that pans out (I have friends that are former drug dealers I council. It's always a dead end thing). He chose to play dirty, and was punished for it. As a landlord, I currently employ 2 convicted felons at $10.00/hr, so I certanly know something about the sacrifices one makes because of their stupidity (and trust me, they've learned the punishments of felonies).

My point is that the man in your story made bad decision after bad decision. Was someone supposed to sweep in and say 'Hey buddy, at least you tried. Even if it was the stupidest thing imaginable, we'll give you a freebie until you get it right - even if it's the thousanth time'?

Did you know that 1/3rd of all million dollar lotto winners go bankrupt in 2 years of their winnings? Some people aren't intelligent, and make horrible decisions, even if they're given the world. Should you bankroll such braindead people? I know we do it in the US Government all the time, but gosh darn it, we need to draw the line somewhere.

Define Bankroll Stick, because if by Bankroll you mean making sure they have acess to food, shelter and healthcare then I say yes.