Because the kid needs to eat to.

Family of four, 280, assuming 2 working adults, comes out to 140 a week per adult.

Typed fast and failed to properly edit. My bad.

Back in the early seventies (Dicky Nixon's wonderous eekonomy) curb shopping was a popular thing where I lived. I knew people who could furnish an entire room going to the right places.

Then the new transplants from the city started bitching about all the riff raff rummaging through their throwaways. They could be casing the house! They see what we're tossing, they're going to start wondering what's inside! We're afraid!

Next they started calling the cops who were all too happy to come and run people off. Better it end up in a dump than let someone who could use it take it home.

with an old-fashioned icebox.

In fact, my parents never called their refrigerator a “fridge” — they continued to call it an “icebox” until the end of their lives, well into the 21st century.

They consider gross income - you get punished for paying taxes and paying for health insurance.

$16/mo is so laughable, I won't bother to renew them. The $200/mo we got while I was a full-time student helped a great deal. Could've gotten more had I been paid minimum wage for the 20-30 hrs of work I was doing for my landlord in exchange for rent and electricity, except I couldn't have afforded my rent or electricity on minimum wage.

Luckily, my son is a vegetarian, and tofu is cheaper than meat; although vegetables are seriously expensive unless you eat them out of cans which is bad for you.

Hopefully, I'll be comfortable before I die. And I'd prefer to do it on my own, but am grateful that there is SOME sort of safety net to be used if necessary.

the only one who has no kids and partner to live together with. There are among his co-workers many younger ones with kids and married and if they hadn't family on the Hawaiian islands, they ALL would be without a home. Some are homeless and live on the beaches, hidden away from the police. Because you know it's a crime to be homeless and get caught sleeping somewhere at most public places. You get fined, ticketed and called to the courts, or if you are a threat to others, thrown into prison.

That alone is to me a crime of inhumanity. These people WORK. And they are NO drug addicts. (Of course some are, but that's another issue). They would never be able to find a rental unit for themselves. Many prefer to not share with others, of whom you do not know their mental and emotional balance. It's now for the third time that my son had a house sharing situation, where one person became a danger to himself and to others. There are amazingly high numbers of suicides. Often not brought into relation of having no job, no safe place for them alone, and no family support.

Not only are "browner" people fired the first, they are also the last to get trusted by landlords to be their tenants. They literally can't find a rental unit all by themselves, despite having a job and despite being stable emotionally. They need a "whiter" person to negotiate the contracts to have a chance.

I really don't know how people with kids and no family support (which of course grown men and women do not want to accept easily) can make it.

It seems to me that it's the real estate rental market and the lack of job security and the absence or way too high health insurance costs (if you have some through your job) together with all fixed costs like electricity and gasoline (and frigging internet access costs) gone through the roof that makes a decent survival possible.

ALL of those problems you are NOT having in Germany or France. If you have a job, you don't have to be homeless and sleep in your car or tent. You may have to rent in the so-called sub-urban apartment complexes, which I think are called "public housing projects" in the US, but so far there have been enough for a cheap enough price that you DO NOT have to live in a tent or a car.

You are health insured, premiums adjusted to your income or jobless situation. You can't be thrown out of your rental place as a tenant they way landlords can do it here. Food stamps are unknown. We had them after wwII. My mother got them. I think for two years after the war, she got them. Currency Reform in 1948 and after that from one day to the next the situation changed completely. Food supply reappeared in the stores and you could buy with the new currency enough to not go hungry any longer. Before that people WERE HUNGRY in Berlin and COLD (like my elderly grand parents). You know that the US were "humane" in their actions back then with their The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949 Until 1947 my whole family on the mother's side survived because of that help by the US, especially for coal to heat and food.

I wonder where the same compassion has gone in America for their own people and their own poor. American Indians need fundraisers to get enough heating fuel. Shame on the other non Indian Americans, who can't solve that situation politically. People in Russia and cold Eastern European countries usually didn't have that problem, afaik. If your country didn't get destroyed by bombs and war, you had at least a roof over your head and something to keep you warm and eat, may be very little, but enough to survive and not get homeless.

So, whatever, it's your laws. You have live with what you create. As Sanders supporters rightfully say: "Fuck that shit".

Here for example is one sort of shit people do:
New city ordinance forces family to destroy their vegetable garden. Really smart city ordinance, right? How often do I drive through my neighborhood and see yuge areas with lawns that all could be used for vegetable production to sustain citizens who live there. Oh and developers also cut out and flatten areas of all valuable trees, like mango, advocado, macademia nut trees to build houses on those lots. You would think they could manage to build something without destroying valuable food producing plants. But no, that would be too much hassle and costly, I guess. If corporations are people, then I say I have never seen more dumbfucking people than them.

Forget about it.

I make $16/hr, full-time. Minimal taxes. About $2,400 after tax a month. $1,200/month goes to rent, $150 to electric, a whopping $350 to health care (don't qualify for any better healthcare sadly), $60 for gas and tolls to get to work, $300 a month for food for my family of four, and then of course there's diapers and copays for if the kids get sick and phone bills and Internet which I need to go to school and my husband's student loans--after all of these expenses I'm often unable to pay on one bill or another. We don't qualify for help and it sucks. This whole country needs a raise, desperately.

We should also be reporting the number of employed, the distributions of annual incomes and how many want/need a job.

I remember Gingrich and the GOP freaking out because we dipped below 5% unemployment. You'd think the tiniest upward pressure on wages was the second coming of Hitler the way they overreacted.

A decent bit of inflation (3.5%) is the best friend of the working human. It depreciates debt & mortgages quite nicely, forces upward pressure on wages and eats into the assets of the 1%.

Thank you Deja. Yes, fortunately I am in a much better state now - I have a good job as a public servant making sure all the servers are up and running that power my state. So I am far more fortunate than I once was, but I know what the struggle feels like. I hope I never forget, or I'll lose the empathy that I think someone requires to do good in this world.