Anecdotal, but when I was a kid in the 80s, minimum wage jobs were mostly part-time, and meant for teenagers living at home, bored retirees, etc.

Unskilled workers with any sort of ambition could fairly easily get 2 to 3x minimum wage and afford a very modest studio apartment.

Once manufacturing jobs went away, it seemed to kill that off. Before that, even if you didn't work in a factory, other employers had to compete for that wage level.

I'm sure at 100k you can afford to rent a one room apartment.

I think the way you are using the word is our "condo", perhaps.

The article really should have made this clear though.

We have a shortage of totally-unskilled jobs that can support a family if both parents work, and that has translated into calls for things like increased minimum wage.

But there is not a shortage of jobs for those willing to put a year or two into trade training, and those often pay well enough to buy a home in a small town.

Many of the fastest growing jobs (bls.gov)[1] pay well over $10/hr and require little a priori skills.

Here you can make 2-4 times that with no education [2]

And here you can take 2 years of school to get a job that pays quite well[3]. Well enough to easily buy your own home and remain employed in a fast-growing sector for life. In some communities, those two years are paid for as long as you go to tech school in the same district you went to high-school in.

This minimum wage argument hides the real opportunities. Re-training and education is the key.

1. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm 2. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm?pay=%2455%2C00... 3. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/occupation-finder.htm?pay=&education...

(Source: Similar income, living on my own and in Switzerland, within 30min of a major city)

No, at no point in the history of the US, even when the minimum wage was first created, would the minimum wage have been enough to afford the median 1BR.

No, but there is a political movement in the United States toward a universal income upon which anyone can live comfortably and this is a symptom of that. Jobs that were previously considered in the realm of "teenager jobs" are now perceived as actual career tracks and a means toward a living. I'm not sure how flipping burgers is a career, but to each his own. On the other side, those same jobs are also being heavily assaulted by automation.

This is a funny way of writing "previously lucrative careers available to blue-collar workers have largely evaporated".

This is a funny way of writing "citizens should just accept any scraps they get"

Imagine if every high school had the budget to run a modern, staffed programming lab, garage, chemistry lab, hell astronomy lab? If kids could get hands on, across America, at age 13? I desperately wish I had Musk levels of wealth if nothing else so I could just start plopping labs across middle America, where as a child my own craving for a hands on education was never delivered by my public schools.

I don't need to imagine. If you work that minimum wage job for ONE DAY, you'll have 100 bucks in your pocket. You know what you can do with that money? You can buy a ten year old enterprise grade server that's been decommissioned and is for sale on eBay, with free shipping. Now you go on /r/homelab and get free help to get it up and running. All the software is free.

There are always excuses, but let's not sit here and pretend like things are more difficult now than they were before. They've never been easier and we've never had as much opportunity.

When I was growing up, any capable computer, used or new, was $3k and there was no internet, no help, and no free software.

Generally, I think you're right that a lot of the information is available. I think maybe there's a misunderstanding with just how little "money availability" there is for someone in rural America working a minimum wage job, hence why my dream is to target people while they're still in school.

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-...

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

I'm not sure how to overcome that.