nowadays adsense is not so consistent. I mean my EPC has dropped since the last 2 months. Previously I used to earn a decent amount...but I don't know what happened...
A real job usually pays at least $10 / hour so... Anyway if you want to make money online for some reason you can start a niche site (something that you like) and grow slowly until you reach a decent number of daily visitors. Content, social bookmarking sites, promotion, backlinks, etc. will help. In something like 6 months you will be able to sell links, sell reviews, affiliates, monetize your site with AdSense or other CPC programs, FAN, etc.
Yes i think this is because of smart price game which is going on from last few months . You may like to read this post where all gr8 adsense maker talking about Adsense Publishers Report Massive Dip in Earnings and CTR . http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/06/adsense-publishers-report-massive-dip.html
They do some of each. I had a site of mine get banned temporarily -- the ads just disappeared from it, but they still showed up on all of my other sites. It turned out to be a misunderstanding and they unbanned it, but it shows that sometimes they'll ban specific sites rather than the whole account.
Theoretically, I suppose, but very unlikely. You'll need at least 250x more posts (10,000 total) on here to even dream of it.