At least in the United States, less than 4% of households report under 5,000 USD in taxable income, while between 14% and 20% of households are defined as under the poverty line (depending on source). The official BLS numbers put it at 10.4 million people who are 'working poor', aka working or looking-for-work for half the year and also under the poverty line (pdf warning), and a little over three quarters of households under the poverty line have at least one person who fits into the "working poor" category. This is further complicated by income disparities and cost of living varying heavily from state-to-state: one can live much more comfortably on 20k in the midwest than on 40k in California.
Reading the article again, I don't quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future.
A little over half of off-campus college students live under the poverty line, making up a significant part of total poverty . There's a perception that a degree (and usually a four-year-degree) is necessary for any desirable "real" (non-retail non-fast food) job. Worse, there's a perception that any degree is both necessary and sufficient for long-term "real" jobs. So you do get a lot of people trying to take classes and make ends meet at the same time, even if the system eventually shoves them out the door with a lot of student loans and a liberal arts degree that barely improves their options (or not even that: low-income folk who drop out get screwed even worse).
It's probably not the average case, but it does make up a non-trivial portion of the total.
((On the other hand, many of the issues raised in the linked blog post show problems related to information access. "Sliding scale" payments usually mean nearly free for a low-income mother, in the odd case where she doesn't qualify for Medicaid. The documentation necessary to set up even a post-9/11 bank account is less than that necessary to get most forms of public assistance including WIC or TANF, while there are other complex reasons people in poverty avoid bank accounts. It's quite possible to cook basic staples with nothing more than a microwave, a plate, and a couple pieces of silverware, but that's not really something that's taught in Home Ec or cookbooks. And the depression self-diagnosis is... not robust.))
another emerging issue is that degrees can have a negative utility these days. if your degree can't land you a "real" job, and employers who would otherwise take you now see you as 'overqualified', your options are more limited than if you never went to college in the first place.
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.