Jackie Gleason Quotes

Waiting tables has never paid my bills, a fact which I prefer to hide from my colleagues with deep sighs about the price of just about everything.

People assume NFL cheerleaders are within some vague sniffing distance of the good life, but a Ben-Gal is paid seventy-five bucks per game. That is correct: seventy-five bucks for each of ten home games. The grand cash total per season does not keep most of them flush in hair spray, let alone gas money to and from practice.

People can't live on $7.50 an hour.

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

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.

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

Thousands of Ohio families are going deeper and deeper in debt just trying to pay their heating bills, fill prescriptions, and buy groceries. The current minimum wage is simply not enough.

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.

Being unemployed - or working at minimum wage - is rough in the best of circumstances.

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

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?

House Republican leadership have refused to allow a clean minimum wage vote. Close to 15 million Americans will be affected if we did this. Do Republicans really expect a family to live on less than $11,000 a year?

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.

Stewardesses are still paid so little that in many cases, new hires qualify for food stamps.

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

The thing I've learned most about poverty is how expensive it is to be poor. It's super easy to pay rent every month if you earn enough to pay rent and have a decent job. It's super hard to pay rent if you need a coupon from the state and then need to go find an apartment that will accept that coupon and only that coupon.

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.

My dad was a high school teacher and made no money.

I got as little as a $75 a week when I started.

When you don't have much and you need to be at work, there's no such thing as being sick.

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.

The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.

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

Poverty breeds a lack of self reliance.