Comments on: Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days – Living on Minimum Wage

By: Kat

Kat — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:02:38 +0000

Going to the ER at 6am for a UTI is ridiculous. Wait until morning and grab yourself a jug of 100% Cranberry juice (not cocktail) and a $10 pack of Uristat. Bam $15 bucks and you save several hundred dollars by avoiding the ER.

By the way, I DO NOT back Universal Health Care. It’s one more step towards socialism. And I don’t want to be put on a waiting list when all the hypochondriacs start coming out of the woodwork thinking they have every illness known to man and MUST be treated for it. I would rather buy my way in.

By: broke joke

broke joke — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 06:48:24 +0000

This is bull shit!!! Come on… at 325 for rent and 2 people working, he’s got it easy!!! at 7 per hr, that should be about 45-50 a day each, 20 days a month for 2 people, that’s about 2,000 month!!! Try living in the bay area California, rent is about 1,000 a month for a 1 bedroom! I curently live off of about 150-200 for food each month!!! they should have at least 200-400 a month left over even in a pricey area! They made it look harder then it is! Not to say it’s easy… IT’S NOT!!! But grow a pair of balls and do what you got to do! This guy bitches about a wrist pain and goes to the E.R.! grow a pair and work like a man! I’m only 23 and I know what it means to work for your money… believe that! I eat potatoes, chicken, onions, and rice… that’s how you live cheap. Not the best diet, but you do what you have to! SURVIVAL!!! How are you gonna make it?

Morgan Spurlock is a bitch!!!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:26:39 +0000

i though it was very interesting and educanting show.I learned a lot from it, and it shure changed my mind for a number of children i was planing to have.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:25:12 +0000

What about someone like me who had all of that and then his wife suddenly decided she didnt want to be with him anymore, abandoned him AND his son, taking everyhing he owned pretty much and then getting laid off from his job had to find a low paying job? Sometimes things happen to where people LOOSE things. Not everyone rushes into things. One minute you are on top, the next you are on the bottom. Do not put yourself on high and do not think yourself any better than the rest of us.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:22:29 +0000

Two things :

I work two jobs, both of which are not minimum wage but slightly more. I have a son. I am scraping to get by the way it is. I think the USA had outrageous costs on almost everything. Insurance would be awesome, as well as a CAP PRICE ON CAR INSURANCE. Some companies overcharge the hardest working people. Lower gas prices, etc. Making little money would not be a problem if the richest of us would not overcharge the poorest. That is how the richer get richer and the poorer get poorer.

Second, I am a single father. Noone cares. I work hard to support my son and take care of him. His mother skipped out on us when he was 2 weeks old and we have not seen her since. I have no idea where to even begin if I were to search for her. At least women have a motherly instinct. I had to learn to cook, clean, etc so I could be a father AND a mother. People seem to cry when it comes to a single mother, but when they see a single father all the problems that a single mother would have seem to vanish in their eyes. Those same problems are there. There a couple things that men can handle better than women, but do not forget the vice versa of that. There are a lot of things that women can handle that men cant.

I just see women at work play the “oh I am a single mother so I should get more hours / get to go home early / get some form of special treatment” card when I am a single father working two jobs and work twice as hard as them. I never ask for any kind of special treatment from work. I expect the same thing as everyone else.

Bottom line, however : Universal health care would be awesome, but lower prices and government set LOWER prices of certain things would be just as helpful. If there were pricing stnadards, then the economy would be helped as well as hard working americans.

I personally went from a rich lifstyle to a hard working lifestyle in the matter of a few days. Do NOT think for a moment that you cannot end up being one of the “poor” people. Start building your safety net and pushing for better ways for poorer people to live. Who knows? Maybe even find a solution for the richer people to live even better in the process, such as lower prices in the economy.

By: Judi

Judi — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:40:03 +0000

Get as much education as you can and leave those babies in baby heaven. Even animals make nests for their new babies. Have a nest egg, insurance, marriage BEFORE Having babies. It is very expenive for two adults, so you know what a life you will have. Look around you. Learn from other’s mistakes. Be a giver..

By: Judi

Judi — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:32:33 +0000

You are so correct! I would also add not to have children, until middle 30’s and early 40’s formen. Use that free time to marry and get to know each other and save. Use that time for education, travel and helping others. I know it works, because I did it. I started making .65 per hour in 1959 and ended up earning over 60K per year n 2001. I stayed with my last employer for almost 40 years.
I always worked overtime and extra jobs and took college courses, and finished my degree in 2006 at age 64. I now work as a teacher assistant, with a pension and social security.I spend most of the TA salary heping my students and families in need, without them knowing I was the one.
Boric Acid Powder wouldhave got rid of the ants etc. in their apartment, and they should have worked two jobs, since they did not have children. The Free Store and The Soup Kitchen was just a blessing from God. The money he spent on his brother’s kids was nonsense. http://www.daveramsey.com is a Debt Czar, and if they had follwed his plan, they would have been better off. Never go to the Emergency room,unless it is a matter of life and death, for they charge the uninsured the most. Try to always have health insurance.
God bless everyone and a kind and divine 2009.

By: shan

shan — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 15:45:00 +0000

i spent 20 years raising my 2 children without health care, working 2 and 3 jobs at a time and missed my children growning up. i wish more people would take minimum wage seriously and do something about it. my daughter passed away due to an illness that could have been fixed if i had insurance. she was 6 years old. my son has heart disease that is congenital and i am forever guilt ridden becase i was so powerless due to the situation i was in. i am educated and strong but still i couldnt help my children no matter how hard i worked. i have great empathy for poor single working single mothers and try my best now to help them, funnything is, so does my now grown up son. it gave us great insight to the plight of minimum wage earners and we do not think of them as lesser people. this is a government issue and i believe the government creates this problem because they just do not care about anyone who doesnt have a million dollars.

By: Guaranteed Health Benefits Plan

Guaranteed Health Benefits Plan — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 05:37:46 +0000

After having my techie job outsourced, I found it hard to support my family on even $20/Hour or a few times minimum wage. A halfway decent place to rent for a family is about 1K a month, then there are utilities, a little thing called FOOD, insurance, transportation, etc.

I’m doing a bit better now, have learned to live with less, and how to get along. but still…have some compassion, guys.

By: John

John — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:15:22 +0000

The show is dishonest from the beginning. It was staged to fail. 30 days is simply too short of a timespan to lift people who start from nothing. Were they supposed to end up millionaires? This is the same guy who ate a lot of fast food all day and became very unhealthy from it. Yet, others that tried the same thing, but with smaller portions, remained healthy. It was the amount of calorie intake, not the food that caused his health problems.

It takes years of hard work to have a decent lifestyle. And there’s nothing wrong with that. To walk away from this show and preached that all people contribute to an universal health system is wrong.

By: jim

jim — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 15:17:25 +0000

I don’t know if that was a premise because Morgan’s “minimum wage job” was something that paid more than minimum wage, but I do agree with your thoughts.

As for inefficiency, it would take some time for a good system to be in place but I think it would be an improvement over the current system. A year is shorter than never, right?

By: Lauren

Lauren — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:16:08 +0000

While I do agree that it is important to understand the struggles of minimum wage work, I have to disagree with the premise that it is hard to find jobs that pay more than minimum wage. While my first job as a teenager did pay minimum wage, every job after that paid more, up to $10/hr as a teaching aide. This was without a degree, of course, since I was still in my teens at that point. These jobs did not include health benefits, but this was only because they were temporary. My fiance’s kid brother makes well over $10/hr waiting tables at a local restaurant. The jobs *are* out there. While it is difficult to make a substantial salary without a college education these days, a high school education is typically sufficient…not to mention free. It disturbs me that several of my middle-class younger cousins have decided not to take education seriously and will likely not graduate from high school. If they end up on minimum wage for the rest of their lives, is it really society’s fault?

My concern about universal health care is its inefficiency. Is it very beneficial for everyone to have health care if you have to be on a year-long waiting list when you need surgery?

By: jim

jim — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:19:17 +0000

Thanks for the compliment gg,
You are correct and your points are definitely important to keep in mind, something I didn’t even consider (and I’m sure a lot of people didn’t consider). Ultimately however, do you think that universal healthcare should be something we should have? While I believe the scene with the diabetic couple (or just the diabetic husband) where they said they couldn’t get treatment unless they went to the free clinic does underscore an issue: can lower income families without health insurance afford healthcare?

One interesting thing I don’t remember being mentioned is welfare… did anyone catch something I missed? It seems like welfare could be something that could help these folks and wasn’t part of Spurlock’s experiment.

By: gg

gg — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:42:50 +0000

jim

I agree that the mainipulation was not on the level of a Moore film. I just wanted to point out that the world as protrayed on the screen was not a complete reflection of reality since people were posting that it made them change their minds about health care. Changing one’s opinion is fine and dandy but if that change it made on the basis of manipulated facts….well, that is sad in my opinion.

Nice blog BTW

By: jim

jim — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 17:51:34 +0000

GG, I do agree with the points made by econopundit's post but ultimately Spurlock's experience was designed to show hardship. While some of the things he did may seem "dishonest", or at least questionably convenient, in his quest to show the minimum wage lifestyle, I do think it did a good job in showing a glimpse into that life that many of us never think about. Where there are many who struggle to survive, there are those like david who work hard and succeed. Creative liberties were taken, artificial rules were in place, discoveries were conveniently made, but I don't think anything was manipulated as significantly as Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and the creative editing used to show him walking into a bank and walking out with a rifle on the same day. Wouldn't you agree? As for the political motivations, I don't really know about that stuff and I would naive to assume there were no political motivations (there always are, that much I know) so I will leave that to the experts to debate.