[Coda]

"Living in a safe part of Los Angeles" is enough to make $9/hour not okay. Even if I didn't have any student loan debt, if I were living in the cheapest studio apartment I can find, if this $9/hour job were giving me 40 hours per week (spoiler: not going to happen), and if I were single, $9/hour would leave me with less than $300/month to handle electricity, natural gas, a Metro pass (or car payments, fuel, and car insurance), and a phone, and if I were this non-college-educated single white 31-year-old male I'd be getting the lowest possible tier of food stamps to get food. I wouldn't have health insurance. I would have to save up in order to buy something as simple as a pair of shoes.

Heaven forbid I live in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles at that point -- I'd be homeless.

In today's world, you can BARELY scrape by on $9/hour if you live in a large city, and it's still tight in a medium-sized city. If you have any sort of family or debt, $9/hour jobs don't cut it. McDonald's recently had a nasty PR issue because they released a budget plan for their workers that FLAT-OUT ASSUMES that you're working two jobs, and even then it's only "affordable" because they've assigned unrealistically low numbers to some things and left out others.

And if you're working two jobs, you're stuck working two jobs. Forget searching for a better job. Forget going to school to train for a better job. You've got to spend 60 hours per week at work, 56 hours per week sleeping, and then once you factor in traveling to and from work, eating meals, and taking mandatory breaks at work, there's not any time left for searching and interviewing. (And besides, where are you going to get the dress shirt, tie, and slacks to interview in if you're living on $9/hour?)

Telling someone in financial trouble to take any job that they can find is DAMAGING and counterproductive. It doesn't work.