Keep in mind that the poverty line is the US is SO LOW - According to the US Department of Health and Human Services'
website, poverty for a family of one in the continental US is making under $10,830 per year. Poverty for a family of four, even, is under $22,050. Minimum wage in the United States is $6.55 now, and will be $7.25 at the end of next month. If you work ONE full time job, forty hours a week, at minimum wage, you earn 6.55 x 40 x 52, or $13,624 per year. That's above poverty for one person!
People don't have minimum wage jobs for long, generally, except in a recession like this one. We will eventually come out of the recession, though, which means more jobs will be available. I worked my way up from minumum wage to making $10.50 an hour, which means I make $21,480 per year. I have only had ONE previous full-time job (minimum wage) and a previous part time job, and I have NO college degree, and yet I, living alone, make enough money to be above the poverty line for a family of 3! I believe that if I can do it, other people can do it too.
Here's a last example. Say you do have a family of four. If the father works first shift and the mother works second shift, as an example, you could have someone home with the kids 24/7 even with both parents working full-time jobs. A family doing this with both the mother and father making minimum wage would make $27,248 per year, which is almost $5,200 over the poverty line! From this
site, you can see that McDonald's workers, on average, make more than minimum wage. You can clearly work a crappy fast food job and stay above the poverty line.
I realize discussing what poverty is isn't really the point of this thread, but I did it to make the point that poverty in the US at least is relatively hard to achieve unless you just don't want or don't try to ever be above the poverty level. Therefore, I don't believe for a second that we should give people in poverty more help than they're already getting. We have Medicaid to help the poor with healthcare. We have unemployment to help people who are between jobs. We have low income apartments and housing available. We have food stamps. Minimum wage, itself, ensures that NO ONE can work a full-time job in the United States, and alone, be under the poverty line. To resort to crime when they have all of this help thrown at them is just selfishness.
In fact, I'd go one step further, and say that a fair number of people who are in poverty and steal are the people who would be criminals regardless of their income. A discerning hiring manager can pick up a lot about a person's personality in a job interview, and job interviews are required to get jobs. People who are completely disrespectful of laws and rules are probably going to have a poor showing in their job interviews and not get hired for the job. Even the people with these kinds of personality problems who manage to have good job interviews and get jobs will lose them if they are caught stealing from their jobs, breaking laws on the clock, or disregarding the employers' rules.
As a footnote, I realize you all are not all from the US, but that's where I live and what I know, so the US's figures are the ones I'm using. Circumstances are different in other countries, so if earning minimum wage puts you below the poverty line in some other country I believe that country should offer more assistance those in poverty to reduce crime.
