Thomas Carper Quotes

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

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

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

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Let me tell you something: I have members in my charter who, after paying their rent and house bills and taking care of their families, don't even have enough money left over to pay the fifteen dollars a week dues.

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.

Every day, families in the United States face the stark choice between a roof over their heads and food on the table. Buying health insurance, owning a home, and saving up for college are just too far out of their reach.

It's very difficult when you have $1.50 per day to spend on food and drink, but for people who live this reality, that money also has to cover medical expenses and education, fuel and shelter - sometimes for an entire family.

When we talk about the kind of folks whose lives will be made better by raising the minimum wage, we're not talking about a couple teenagers earning extra spending money to supplement their allowance. We're talking about providers and breadwinners. Working Americans with bills to pay and mouths to feed.

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

In the 1960s, a minimum wage job would keep a family of three afloat.

These days an income is something you can't live without - or within.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist.

Nothing helps families make end meet than higher wages.

I think, in this country, if you work 40 hours a week, and you work hard, you ought to be able to afford an apartment somewhere.

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

Americans shouldn't have to hold down two or three jobs to make ends meet.

The minimum wage can play a vital role in lifting hard-working families above the poverty line.

We need to do more to help the men and women across the country who are working hard but still struggling to make ends meet due to low wages and high healthcare costs.

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

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.

I would say that many of the characters in my stories do not live in true poverty - they are not out on the street; they are not wondering if there will be anything to eat in the next week. They are people who are at the lower echelons of the economic strata.

In the richest country in the history of the world, this Obama economy has crushed the middle class. Family income has fallen by $4,000, but health insurance premiums are higher, food prices are higher, utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices have doubled. Today more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before.

Many blue-collar families struggling to pay rent would be happy to skip paying optional union dues.

Money is kind of just like air - if you don't have air, you can't breathe. If you don't have money, I don't think you'll want to breathe - you won't want to live.