Yep nothing but poor choices and laziness:
"Midway through the last game of the 2013 Carolina League season, after hed swept peanut shells and mopped soda off the concourse, Ed Green lumbered upstairs to the box seats to dump the garbage. Green was already 12 hours into his workday. He rose at dawn to lay tar on the highway. As the sun sank, he switched uniforms and drove to BB&T Ballpark, where he runs the custodial crew for a minor-league baseball team."
...
"Green once held a middle-class job. Now, to make enough money to send his children to college, he works the equivalent of two full-time jobs: one maintaining highways for the state of North Carolina and one ushering fans and collecting trash for a variety of sports teams around Winston-Salem.
The American economy has stopped delivering the broadly shared prosperity that the nation grew accustomed to after World War II. The explanation for why that is begins with the millions of middle-class jobs that vanished over the past 25 years, and with what happened to the men and women who once held those jobs.
Millions of Americans are working harder than ever just to keep from falling behind; Green is one of them. Those workers have been devalued in the eyes of the economy, pushed into jobs that pay them much less than the ones they once had.
Today, a shrinking share of Americans are working middle-class jobs, and collectively, they earn less of the nations income than they used to. In 1981, according to the
Pew Research Center, 59 percent of American adults were classified as middle income which means their household income was between two-thirds and double the nations median income. By 2011, it was down to 51 percent. In that time, the middle groups share of the national income pie fell from 60 percent to 45 percent."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2014/12/14/the-devalued-american-worker/
http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/news/economy/america-part-time-jobs-poverty/