Who do you blame, the kids or the $60,000 a year teachers? Or maybe it's the over educated school administrators who pull down more than $100,000 a year. Who really didn't earn their pay the kid who probably never heard the terminology "half dozen" or the educator who was too busy teaching trigonometry (that I've never used since school) to teach basic day to day terminology.
As far as $15 hr goes; I retired 8 years ago and was starting to get a little bored so I went looking for a job more for entertainment and socializing then money. What I found was the nearest available jobs were 26 miles from my house. Which meant I would be burning almost 4 gallons of gas or about $15 (at the time) just to commute. That meant I would be working the first hour and a half for nothing. The second hour and a half paid the federal tax man and the third hour fed the state tax man. In the end I would be working 8 hours for 4 hours pay. So at the $ 10 hr they offered me meant my take home would be $40 a day or less than what I was paid for an hour on my last job. I decide my day was better spent working on my bike and surfing the web; sort of like what our teenagers do today. Unfortunately we really don't learn as much useful information on a computer as we think. Worse yet the kids today become so disillusioned they just don't care or see a future.
IMHO the real problem today stems from the average family earning $53 k a year.
To prove my point I'll use a car as an example. When I graduated and entered the workforce a nice car had a sticker price of about $2700.00 and I started out making $11,000 a year. The car cost only 25% of my income. Today with an average family income of $53 k it cost one half of a families annual income. That same example could be used for a pound of butter.
Not long ago the American worker was the highest paid worker in the world. Today we are in the twenties!! And it all feeds up.