Well, you know, it's interesting; about 16 years ago, I worked with a guy who was from Canada; we had the same job, a job with which I could barely pay for my rent and PG and E and with which I was forced to borrow money to get groceries because I was being paid poverty wages. And I'm no slouch: I'm educated and have skills, and the job did require a significant amount of skills. But because this country is so shitty, people evidently think the kind of work I was doing, and therefore me, was shitty enough to pay me poverty wages. At any rate, this Canadian guy felt the same way about this job and, in fact, told me how he had been getting paid much better in Canada, doing the same kind of work but with much less stress; because here in the US, not only is it cool to pay someone shit wages but it's also cool to treat them like shit while they work. He was also astonished that after he went to the doctor, he ended up getting a bill. To someone from a place where people are actually treated like human beings and cared for, this place was really weird, to put it mildly. He came here because his wife wanted to. He honestly asked me once why I stay in this little podunk town where it's okay to treat people like shit and all I could do was sit there and think about it and wonder why. Reason why is you get stuck in a cycle in which you can't climb out of shit because there's too much of it and no one is throwing you a shovel.
