@1,
It is society's fault. We are all to blame.

@1: Wow, you really have no compassion. I'm sure there aren't any societal pressures telling her to have sex, or preventing her from being knowledgeable or forceful in advocating for protection when it happens.

@1: Oh, and she dropped out, which means she's lazy and pathetic and deserving of scorn, and not perhaps that she was in any one of many possible unhealthy situations and had to get out of it.

And of course all of those people raising children on such a wage are obviously high school dropouts, despite the fact that for a job earning more than 7.25 a high school dropout would probably be ineligible, as they are for 90% of all jobs in America.....

Could you do me a favor? Fuck, right, off.

@1: If we all agree with you and acknowledge that it's entirely her fault, can we now move on and also acknowledge that society as a whole can benefit from helping her improve her life?

Or are you just one of those types that likes to lord over other people's misfortune?

@3, @4: Please, it's not "society's" fault. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the two dumb dumb parents.

Nevertheless, it is society's responsibility to provide a basic safety net for the millions of dumb dumbs who are inevitably going to fuck up.

Thanks for illustrating, so well, exactly what keeps the US much less than great @1. I'd rather hang out with that single mom and her kid any day, than with you.

@1 Your mom's?

Meanwhile the richest 0.1% gave themselves 60% increases from the work of the bottom 99% who increased productivity for no net pay increase.

One reason why there are so few people earning minimum wage (at least fewer than you'd think) is that many states legislate their minimum wages to be higher than the federal minimum, but most of them have a minimum that's all of 25 cents more. Given that, I'd love to see a breakdown of how many people are earning less than $8/hour.

@7,
So, those two parents were born dumb, and would be and will always be dumb, regardless of anything society might do to try to educate them?

I reject that.

When people fail like that, it's because society has failed them (unless they admit they purposefully and willfully went out of their way to do what they knew was wrong... then it's their own fault).

Regarding the comment @1, there are a few people among my friends/family who have found themselves in that situation, and regrettably, at least one of them really did think it would be good idea to get knocked up by a loser with no motivation to take care of a family. Some people make bad decisions. On purpose.

That said, there is every benefit to giving the children of these scenarios a good opportunity to elude the pitfalls of extreme poverty. Affording their parents a living wage (or something closer to a living wage) is a reasonable solution. There's no reason to believe that the USA can't provide a better minimal standard of living than it does now.

@11: I'm 31, married, expecting my first kid, and making over $15/hour already. At the same time, I can easily empathize with other people who didn't have all the advantages I have had in my life which helped me end up where I am.

@21,

How does having better skills lead to the creation of more jobs? Are you under the impression that this country has full employment?

@21- It's not a lack of education and skills. The jobs don't exist. There are hundreds of thousands of educated people working unskilled jobs. The skilled jobs aren't going to magically appear and the unskilled jobs aren't going to magically do themselves. Someone has got to stock the shelves. We're underpaying people for needed labor.

We're overpaying people to do completely parasitic things like derivatives trading, which is tangential to the topic at hand but another symptom of the sick system.

@20- So the kids of the people who made poor choices should just starve, right?

@15: So, those two parents were born dumb, and would be and will always be dumb, regardless of anything society might do to try to educate them?

Who says they were born dumb and will remain dumb? People often wise up with age and experience, especially if there's a safety net that allows them to recover from their mistakes.

My point is that blaming "society" is a bad habit among liberals, and we don't need it in order to justify compassion for people who fuck up. We we can assign responsibility to the individual while at the same time helping those who've acted irresponsibly get back on their feet.

@20: Advantages like being born to an intact married couple who didn't divorce, relatively good schooling, being white, cis male, etc, etc, etc. Do you really need a fifth grade Social Studies class?

@26,
Why is blaming society a bad habit? Why do we need to assign responsibility to an individual for something he/she may or may not be personally responsible for?

In any case, I agree we need a safety net. I just think that telling people they're getting social help via a safety net "because they acted irresponsibly" is pointless and potentially even counterproductive.

@Ken: but what the education system gives us are Occupy Demonstrators.

This is true, but it's not the whole story. There have been massive efforts at all levels of the educational system to produce more STEM graduates, and yet the skills gap persists. Anyone with a basic understand of math can tell you that not everyone can be above average in math. The reality is, people vary in their tech potential, just as they vary in height.

So, what to do with all the people who can't find a tech jobs - let them roam wild in the streets?

I'm kind of thinking we cap CEO salaries (which are inflated far beyond their value), raise capital gains tax (ending the tax discount for non-productive "labor"), make income tax more progressive, raise inheritance tax, and thereby push some of the dusty hoards of wealth back into the economy in order to modestly prop up compensation for non-technical jobs.

@28: Why is blaming society a bad habit?

Because from a rhetorical perspective, you are needlessly alienating large numbers of reasonable people who don't share your philosophical aversion to free will.

And, speaking from experience, you're not doing "disadvantaged" kids any favors by lying to them that their destiny is out of their control.

As a modest proposal, why not just allow the poor to eat their babies? It would allow them more ease to support themselves, and also prevent a second generation of poverty.

@25,

Please demonstrate to us how many unemployed people there are and how many unfilled jobs there are. Thanks much.

@32,
Don't use "destiny" and "social influence" interchangeably. I do believe in free will and yeah, people make their own choices. Their selection of what choices they get to make are decided upon largely by their environment (i.e., the social influences). A kid who's been given massive amounts of misinformation about reproduction and birth control will have a different choice selection than a kid given correct info about it. That's not destiny, but it's also not in the kid's control.

@30,

Single motherhood was less common in the days when the welfare system was stingier and the social stigma attached to single parenthood was stronger.

That's just a correlation. Where's the evidence suggesting either of those things cause more mothers to be single?

Here's what I observe.

A lot of so-called (so-called by you, urban educated liberal SLOG readers) "stupid people" live in places in the South, where 3-bedroom houses cost $64,000 and come with a couple of acres of land. Also, since it's relatively warm, they don't need as much heating, and electricity can be supplied by low cost nuclear (TVA).

Because of this, and because everyone knows each other they can afford a couple of vehicles and maybe add some housing on their property. Because of this, people can live without paying high rents, and once you've eliminated housing, and you get your truck for $5400, you can spend the rest of your "minimum wage" paycheck on things like food, smokes, beer, and bullets (for hunting). People don't sit around on computers because the weather is nice and you can hunt, fish, go tubing and hang out at the bar all night. And if you're lucky enough to work at the non-union BMW plant for $17 an hour, you can afford a whole lot of girlfriends.

Now, again, supposedly, these free living, free carousing folk are stupid according the the litany. But smart people like us, work 77 hours a week, trying to figure out how to make a web page talk to a database, or how to correctly filter a jpg file, and then have to spend all our money on rent, and expensive restaurants. But we are the smart ones.

@36: What'cha mean we, white boy? JBITDMFOTP...

@25- "Create value in most industries...."

"Most industries" being a small group of tech and engineering jobs which will always be a small percentage of the jobs in the USA. Do you think there's enough unfilled demand to cover the number of unemployed?

And as for creating value, there's a hell of lot of value being created in the services industries and it's not being rewarded with increased pay.

@38- Oh, so your point is that no matter how good you judgement is, there just aren't going to be good jobs for everyone? Because that's the upshot of not creating new jobs.

No, I don't want to take away the word processor. I want the person who uses the Office Suite to do the work of a whole typing pool to get paid what a whole typing pool used to make rather than what 1.25 typists used to make.

@38,

So your advice is to encourage everyone to get better educations, but under the pretext that most won't be able to acquire better jobs that way, since we still have too few jobs available. How does that solve anything?

@43: If we have fewer jobs than people, and you think some of those jobs shouldn't pay a living wage.... What's your endgame for the less well off? Or do you just not give a fuck, cause it's not you?

@1: End your life. Immediately.

@30: Single motherhood may have been less common in the days when women had fewer options, but at what cost? I spoke to a woman last year who had been staying home to raise her children, and finally took the kids and left her husband when he threw her into a wall and brandished a hunting knife at her. If she hadn't been able to get welfare and food stamps, she might not have been able to leave.
(And for those so heartless as to suggest that she should have chosen a better husband in the first place, he only became violent after developing PTSD during his military service.)