We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."
e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. (However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, perhaps don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms?). Moreover, my point was that having wealth tends to affects your perceptions to "expand the size of the in-group" - money does provide more avenues to be independent, and thus a financially independent youth can (ignorantly) miss opportunities to learn how to have healthy co-dependent relations as most erroneously assume that such relations are not important to them because they have achieved "independence". Learning to be independent is important. But then learning to understand the importance of co-dependency is another step to become a mature adult.