Spurlock, can you spare a dime?

Recently in my G+T class, I viewed Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days.  Remember, this is the same guy from Supersize Me.  This is a series where he does unusual things for thirty days.  The episode I saw was him and his fiancee living on only minimum wage for thirty days.  Currently, federal minimum wage is $7.25.  I did see things I expected to see, but there were a lot of things I did not expect to see.  Foremost, it was nearly impossible to live off of only minimum wage.  Minimum wage does not give you health coverage.  If you were to get sick or hurt, visiting the hospital would basically finish you off.  Another thing which surprised me was the injuries.  Both Morgan and his fiancee became sick.  I never thought that living only on minimum wage would mean an increased likelihood of becoming sick or injured.  In poverty there is poor sanitation and back-breaking labor.  This most likely will send you to the hospital which will be obscenely expensive.  I knew living on minimum wage would be hard, but I did not expect it to be near impossible.  However, I think this was only realistic to an extent.  Spurlock never showed long term effects of living on minimum wage, and the very negative sides of poverty.  The apartment he rented was in an area with drug trafficking.  The episode never showed any drug trafficking (which I suppose is a good thing).  I know for a fact that areas in that kind of poverty can be open to drug traffic and violence.  None of that was shown in this episode, but drug traffic and violence would probably be a part of reality.  Overall, I learned from this episode.  I learned that most people on minimum wage are regular people who fell on hard times (not neccessarily because of drugs) and are looking for a way out of poverty.  The US, currently, is not making poverty an easy thing to climb out of.  We do not give a chance to these people to better themselves.  I learned that we have to change the way we work so we raise the standard of living for the people in poverty.