Thom Tillis Quotes

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

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

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

How can anyone live off of minimum wage?

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

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.

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

What keeps me up at night is poverty and unemployment.

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.

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

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

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.

Of course you've got a low unemployment rate when people have got to work two and three jobs just to make ends meet.

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

People can't live on $7.50 an hour.

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.

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.

When you grow up with a mother who has to wash dishes and clean hotel rooms, you know the importance of having a job, and you can't be without a job for any length of time, or you will be without anything.

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.

In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.

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

The working poor is a growing population in this country.

The sad fact is that in communities such as mine, the minimum wage is the maximum wage.

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.

America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.