"Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can't get a job, and if it weren't for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care."Thus spake Mike Huckabee.
The United States enacts a minimum wage (as do some individual states) that tries to establish a floor for what can be paid as a wage by firms. The current minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. In 2008, the official U.S. poverty level for a family of 4 was $21,834 ( Census Bureau "Poverty Thresholds"). With a 40 hour week, a family of 4 with one minimum wage earner would earn $15,080, only 69 percent of the poverty level. [...]
Studies of families that stop receiving TANF [Temporary assistance to needy families] show that 60 percent of former recipients are employed—typically at poverty-level salaries between $6 and $8.50 an hour—while 40 percent are not employed. Lack of available child care can well keep single mothers from working as required, for example.
Too bad those manufacturing jobs that once provided employment - and benefits - for US citizens were moved "off-shore" by greedy conglomerate pigs like the Kochs who thus increased their profit margin yet still enjoy generous corporate welfare.
As another critic of Huckabee's mis-spakes observes here:
Huckabee has involuntarily blurted out something certain to resonate with right-wing pathologies, only to try to quickly take back its particulars. When he recently made the false claim that Obama grew up in Kenya, only to later clarify that he misspoke, he merely revealed that he had screwed up in the particular manner in which he blew the conservative dog-whistle, not that he never intended to blow it at all.
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