Let's pay 16 year olds $31.2k to sweep floors!!!!

[raging moderate]

145. How else can they afford college/trade school? and a house down payment? and babies in their 20s?

In the first place, most teens will be working only part-time, because they will be in school. In the second place, yes, most of them really do need the money nowadays, with the CRUSHING financial load that has recently been placed on the three items in my reply title. I remember the early 60s, when my sister got married, and her husband could earn enough money to afford an engagement ring, college courses, a down payment on a house, and several babies, while they were still in their twenties. She held a job briefly, but most of that came out of HIS paycheck as a beginning worker. Working wives were lauded for carrying a double load, and their efforts really added to family stature. Several years later, when I was in my twenties, all that was evaporating like snow in May. Employers began cutting wages to erase the working wife advantage until almost all wives HAD to work full-time (as soon as the poor baby was SIX WEEKS OLD) just to keep the family in food, shelter, and diapers. I remember how my husband was jeered at for letting me take a year off for each baby (actually, though, he didn't; I had to take a job well before that just to make payments on the 80-foot single mobile home in a mobile home park). And that was even before the tuition costs and housing costs ballooned under the Bush/Cheney regime. We had big student loans, but not as bad as they typically are now.