Today, the bottom 25% of the population pays 3-4% of the income tax collected by the Federal government which means that most of them have no earned income.
Apparently they're unemployable at all times in all places.
That's just wacky. The bottom 25% pay little or no tax because of low marginal rates and (relative to their incomes) high personal and dependent deductions.
I thought I'd check through a book I haven't read yet, for this.
Freedom From Fear by the noted historian David M. Kennedy covers the years 1929 to 1945.
The following describes Lorena Hickok's travels throughout part of Appalachia. She was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and reported back to the WH on her findings:
Kennedy writes: "...Men who had once loaded tons of coal per day grubbed around the base of the tipple for a few lumps of fuel to heat a meager supper--often nothing more than 'bulldog gravy' made of flour, water, and lard. The miner's diet, said United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, 'is actually below domestic animal standards.'"
"...the miners struck Hickock as a singularly pathetic lot. "'Some of them have been starving for eight years', she reported to Hopkins. 'I was told there are children in West Virginia who never tasted milk!'"
She visited a mining camp: 'Some miners' families, said Hickok, 'had been living for days on green corn and string beans--and precious little of that. And some had nothing at all, actually hadn't eaten for a couple of days. At the Continental Hotel in Pineville [Kentucky] I was told that five babies up one of those creeks had died of starvation in the last ten days...'"