by Sommer Casady

Created on: April 15, 2008

Twenty years ago minimum wage was at three dollars an hour. That may seem extremely low seeing as how minimum wage has just reached its all time high at eight dollars an hour. But the truth is that although Americans are earning five dollars more per hour we are strained to spend four dollars a gallon at the gas pump when just the change out of our pockets used to get us any where we would like to go. Not only is gas killing most Americans but also the necessary goods such as milk, eggs and bread has also gone up and with these prices going up families are struggling to make ends meet.

If families are having trouble making ends meet then think about all of the single parents out there. To afford to live in this country as a family with two children the parent has to bring in seventeen dollars an hour. My question is that if we have progressed so much in our country then why is everyone struggling to live? I am only sixteen years old and already i have had a job in a restaurant where i worked thirty two to thirty four hours a week. I am only a kid but I have had to work so much only so that i could afford to drive to school and also pay off car insurance. What I'm worried about is that with that much work i could barely support myself let along pay off bills. I'm worried about how my generation is supposed to head out for our future when we are getting stuck in down end jobs. There's no way to earn enough money to make it out into the world and the price of our dollar is going down gradually. But if we've gotten this bad with inflation in the past 4 years then where are we headed?

Three years ago my parents and i moved out of a house that we had purchased for 300,000 dollars we got out of it for 600,000 dollars; double what we had bought it for. Now just three years later the market has crashed and nobody can sell their homes. The reason for this is that people are struggling to live right now and can't contain their money but are always working up to their next bill. No one has any spending money anymore therefor our economy is crashing and store owners are having to raise prices to stabilize what they are loosing and also so that they can pay off their own bills and gas prices. Another reason why the housing market is crashing is because people could take out loans and buy a house that they couldn't afford. People were excited because they could finally get the house they'd always dreamed of and only had to pay off a few bills at first and then the banks sticked

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