As a person who makes 35K as an accountant with a management degree in Atlanta, GA. You either live 30 miles out and deal with 1:30 drive commute, or you rent a small apartment in the city with a roommate and barely get by. Meanwhile top execs make over 70k a month in commissions and I'm sitting here in awe. My rent will go up 15% next year, a 5% raise won't even do me right. I look for jobs who ask for a CPA and 3 years experience offering 45K a year. I mean wtf is the point of trying anymore. The worst part is. Business owners will look at this media and think, wow a normal person can live off 30K a year. Let's pay everyone that and see if we can get away with it. Realistically our wages just arnt up to par. Our parents are getting their pensions cut in half (literally). Young people feel suppressed. We imagined a society where if we went to college we could live and save for a decent life. Now we live in a shithole apartment complex who is raising rates, employers who aren't satisfying any company growth to their non executive employees. Employers giving 15K raises to executives and a 2.5% raise to their employees. We have more people who busted their ass in college only for people to think it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, as a society we are discouraging positive growth with very ugly growth, like raising rents on people who cannot even afford where they are to begin with. A million different companies with a million different profits and losses who really couldn't afford giving employees a 15/hr wage. America's corporate understanding is very scewed because nothing is identical. Private Cos can do what they want and never have to show any revenues or gains to their employees. They can spend multimillions of dollars on advertising but come back and say they cannot raise wages because of "margins". Companies don't give out bonuses anymore. The general publics spending capital is being crushed because of raising property cost, raising income taxes, and the ability for business owners to provide jobs without telling prospects their range of pay before the interview. It's a race to the bottom and eventually its going to have a damaging effect on the status quo of the average American citizen.