Have you ever had to support yourself or others while earning minimum wage? Or did your upper-middle-class family fund your college education so you could make a comfortable living as a software engineer? I'm seriously wondering because your tone is full of self-entitled, condescending ignorance.
Yes. The home I grew up in was lower middle class at best, though it's irrelevant to my arguments and generally none of your business.
But since it's now a subject of interest, what is relevant was that earning minimum wage as a teenager helped my blue collar family since I paid for my own clothes, transportation, gas, food, school incidentals, and many other expenses.
I wouldn't have found a job paying $15 an hour. I would have been unemployed (though we don't count poor teenagers as unemployed usually). And my family's budget would have been negatively impacted.
I don't think it's irrelevant because certain foundations predispose one to certain lines of arguments. Particularly
>> If adults with kids aren't qualified for something more involved or demanding than grocery bagging
Not all adults have had an equal opportunity to obtain a skill-set that would qualify them for a better job and once you are stuck barely scraping by with a livable-wage it's very difficult to alter that situation. Culture and upbringing play a large part; children are easily impressionable, those growing up in troubled families or neighborhoods are less likely to do well in school and less likely to gain a skill-set that they would need to provide more value in the future.
> what is relevant was that earning minimum wage as a teenager helped my blue collar family since I paid for my own clothes, transportation, gas, food, school incidentals, and many other expenses.
I think it's great you were able to do that, but that doesn't mean that this minimum-wage would be sufficient for someone without a family to support them, or trying to acquire a skill-set later in their twenties.
Regardless, bringing personal history into it is bad reasoning and unnecessarily divisive at best. And at times it brings out the worst in people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority