Give them a pencil and piece of paper and have them show you how a single person or married couple survives on...let's say ten dollars an hour. (You could even be generous and have them do it based on twelve dollars an hour.)
Rent, food, auto, insurance on car and health insurance, utilities, pay check withholdings (tax refund will not help until a year from now)...I'm sorry but we've already gone way over the budget based on even a twelve-dollar wage.
Is your Republican friend still writing - or have they even started?
They know it's not possible, just like the worker knows it.
The answer, of course, is to go find a second job. Our GOP friends won't care if you end up working more than forty hours a week to make ends meet. As a matter of fact, we have plenty of workers trying to stay awake on three jobs.
The American Dream is the Right-Wing mantra. It is their mystical formula for our Middle and Lower Class income problems. With no clear answers to write down on our test question, they always revert to something like, "Anyone who works hard and perseveres will succeed. We promise because that is the American Dream."
They just don't have an answer as to how.
Unless our government forces them to start paying a livable wage, they will never stop finding third-world countries that will pay their workers a fraction of what our workers need, all just to turn out cheap and questionable products. We can't find American-Made merchandise in stores any more.
The American Dream? Most of our workers - and want-to-be workers - only have American Nightmares as they sleep in their car or a cardboard box somewhere.
GOP Carly Fiorina just announced her run for President. She was CEO of HP. She orchestrated a twenty-thousand-worker layoff and retired with a golden parachute worth twenty-million dollars! (Sounds like another GOP candidate named Romney, doesn't it?)
That's the American Dream these days!
