"Pull Yourself up by your Bootstraps"

“Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps…”
As I have blogged before, I HATE when people say that those with insufficient wages or those people with a low income should simply “pull themselves up by their boot straps and get a good job.” One of the major problems I have with this statement is that these people are assuming that all good jobs have benefits and high wages. As a former adjunct instructor and graduate with a Masters degree in Literature and Writing, I can tell you this is not the case. For a year, I worked in my profession as a college instructor, which required an advanced degree, and had no health insurance and a livable, but not high wage. Worse yet, many of the instructors around me, some with their Doctorate degree, were toiling under the same conditions. What should my colleagues with their doctoral degrees do? Should they pull themselves up by their bootstraps too? Is a double doctorate now required for people to survive in the US?
Another problem with the bootstrap argument is that it assumes all people living in the lower incomes have a choice. It assumes that people are unemployed, underemployed, or employed but poor by choice. I have to assert that I believe, in many cases, it is environmentally enforced poverty. Imagine for a moment that you are a child born in the inner city to a low income family. Your parents each work 2 minimum wage jobs, and you are in day care at six weeks. Your parents, whose parents were in the same situation, never went to college and may have not even finished high school, and do not have the tools to properly support you in an education. You go to school at the under-funded city school in your area. The school cannot afford the best teachers because of the under-funding, so you are at a disadvantage from Kindergarten on. Your family lives from check to check and sometimes there is no money for groceries, electricity, etc. How focused would you be on bettering yourself in this situation?
A lot of people reading this would probably say, “I would make the most of the situation. I would still be invested in school and in my future.” Bull. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if your basic needs for survival are not met, you can hardly ever hope to work your way up the pyramid to such things as self-actualization. The American ideal that you can be born in the ghetto and become Andrew Carnegie is a myth that is killing this country.
Yes, there are a few people that crawl up from poverty and live the true American rag to riches story. There are a few out of MILLIONS. The myth of social mobility is just that, a myth. It is a sociological fact that you are highly unlikely to ever be more than one tax bracket richer than your parents as an adult. You are basically born into the class that you will remain in. It is undisputable. Things are not equal, so opportunity is not equal.
So, those that say people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, need to ask themselves, are there really any bootstraps to be pulled?