Bob Thaves Quotes

It's wrong that so many hardworking people - people working full-time, or even multiple jobs - need public assistance just to survive.

It is unacceptable that someone can work full time - and work hard - and not be able to lift themselves out of poverty.

The average family earning minimum wage spends 141 percent of their income struggling to meet basic needs - food, shelter, clothing.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

Does anyone really believe it is possible to make even the most basic ends meet on $5.15 an hour?

If you work, you should not be poor.

Too many jobs don't pay enough to get by, let alone get ahead.

No one wants to work for little money; otherwise, they would be living on the streets.

There's a lot of journalism about poverty, but sometimes it just helps to see that there's a real person who becomes a real mom, who is working with unsustainable wages that could eventually destroy her.

Nobody who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

Dancin' in the welfare lines.

I was very poor and I was a waitress, and it's hard to be a poor waitress in New York.

Anyone who's tried to pay a heating bill, fill a prescription, or simply buy groceries knows all too well that the current minimum wage does not cut the mustard.

No family gets rich from earning the minimum wage. In fact, the current minimum wage does not even lift a family out of poverty.

Today a minimum wage earner has to work a day and a half just to pay for a full tank of gas. That is simply shameful.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

Millions of people are falling out of the middle class into the ranks of the poor.

It is shameful that millions of Americans are suffering the economic injustice of working a full-time job and earning a wage that leaves them below the poverty line.

The best antidote to poverty remains simple - a paycheck. Policies like paid family leave, workplace flexibility and affordable quality childcare can make the difference for two-parent or single-parent working families who struggle to make ends meet.

The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.

No one who works full time and has children should be poor in America.

General well-being is incompatible with lowness of wages.

We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination.