This is going to be ranty-er than usual because I'm mostly writing off-the-cuff. It might also be angrier than usual because the above is an accusation that even members of my own family have made and it just makes me want to punch them in the face.
I was reading this post about classism and honestly, a person is NOT paid according to "how hard they work." I don't know what propaganda drilled this idea into the heads of so many Americans, but wage isn't determined by "how hard one works" so much as how valuable their work is within a given society. That's why we have terms like "manual labor" and "skilled labor"--which are misleading terms anyway, since jobs like construction work obviously require a certain skill set. But if you want proof that this whole "wage = how hard one works" idea is BS, look no further than A-list actors who are paid millions to star in a movie. They don't get paid that much because they work a bajillion times harder than the average waiter, but because the studios are confident they can use that celebrity's name to gain even more money than what they paid. It has absolutely nothing to do with how hard a person works.
To be brutally blunt, saying that "poor people are poor because they don't work as hard as I do" is just an excuse people have made to feel better about themselves and to justify why they "deserve" to be rich while poor people "deserve" to be poor. Instead of actually addressing issues such as increasing class stratification and the surprisingly low social mobility in US society, people just make false assertions like the above and ignore the problem.
