Adam Cohen Quotes

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

My family was mostly unemployed working class.

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

Most poor people earn more than minimum wage when they are working; their problem is not low wages. The problem comes when they are not working.

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

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 must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn't grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt.

It's hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

The fact is, I made $400 a week and only for 26 weeks a year. I never had any money.

An enormous number of mothers in the U.S. are working double time, graveyard shifts, and more than one job just to put food on the table for their kids.

Jobless Men Keep Going We Can’t Take Care of Our Own

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

We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

There are far too many people who get up early in the morning, and work hard, who cannot make ends meet.

I worked on minimum wage; I didn't go to college out of school. I worked multiple jobs, and it's probably not something Sen. Hagan's not had to worry about because we grew up in very different life circumstances.

The hardest work in the world is being out of work.

What is the source of power of musicians who are financially browbeaten, most of whom work for minimum wage or less? Musicians who cannot even afford to buy tickets to operas or concerts in which they themselves perform?

People can't live on $7.50 an hour.

I just remember all those days in the unemployment line, stressed out over when my next job was coming.

While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.

Many hard working people in low paid jobs get housing benefit.

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.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.