> “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
> It becomes sixteen.
I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three", and thus the conclusion that the "poverty line" is broken seems quite likely.
The conclusion seems likely but this logic doesn't make sense. They don't recalculate a food budget every year and multiply it by three, they take that original 1963 number and add inflation. I think this is dumb, but it's dumb in a completely different way than the article is saying.
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three"
If we assume that general inflation captures the right basket of goods, and that (3 × minimum food) was correct in 1963, then what is actually done (adjusting the result in 1963 by inflation) is correct as well.
That is not what you would get if you computed the minimum food budget now and multiplied by 3; the shifting of the food share of the budget is captured in the CPI.
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share
This is not accurate. There was no such principle. There was an extrapolation technique to use well-measured numbers to calculate a desired but not measured number.
This is not a principle about how things should be calculated, it is a tool for dealing with missing features in a dataset.
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here
The share of goods in people expenses is something governments have been tracking extremely well since the end of the inter-wars period (losing some quality during WWII).
As far as economical measurements go, those are among the best you'll get on the real economy (monetary measurements tend to be more precise).
Pretty sure this is AI written or at least assisted. “It’s not just X, it’s Y. And the foo? It bazzed.”
Honestly hard to disagree with what the message is but I can’t really take him intellectually seriously even with an obvious premise with such lazy writing
Yes, everything after the intro seems to be AI-written. It is lazy and unpleasant to read, but beyond that there are some serious issues of inaccuracy and dishonesty that make this worse than other cases I've seen.
> I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I think this is quoting https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2025/..., where the real quote is "The poverty threshold was originally defined as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and is annually adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)." This isn't buried in a research paper, you paraphrased and then claimed it was a real quote by putting in within quotes, and you failed to cite a source. This is deliberately lying to your readers about the core premise of the whole piece.
The next sentence:
> I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.
That isn't even what your fake quote said.
> In her January 1965 article,
What article? You haven't mentioned this yet, and you still haven't cited a single source.
> ”if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”
This is minor, but again this is an inaccurate quote. The original (https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v28n1/v28n1p3.pdf) says "on an average", not "on average". Two out of two uncited quotes are wrong so far, making the whole piece untrustworthy if it wasn't already.
> “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” — Plutarch
I assumed this one was real but I searched anyway because of the pattern of fake quotes. The first result is an article titled "Fake Plutarch Quotes Are the Newest and Most Facile Ailment of All Arguments About Inequality". This is another fake quote, three for three now.
I'm not going to read the rest of this, even without the trustworthiness issues the bland AI filler is not worth spending any time on. Everyone, please do not do this. Whatever rough notes you were going to feed into the AI are much better, just publish that if you don't have the time or ability to make it "good writing", however you define that.
> The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures each September. The first, called the official poverty measure, is based on cash resources. The second, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). The official poverty measure has remained mostly unchanged since it was introduced in the mid-1960s. In contrast, the SPM was designed to improve as new data and methods become available.
I’m not sure how to treat this, but if the official poverty measure is used for practical purposes and not the SPM, the core premise is still entirely valid. I have no idea if that’s the case, and why the “official” one is still measured at all.
The premise is that food is a smaller share of the average budget today, so multiplying a food budget by three is too low. But they don't recalculate a new food budget every year, they literally just take the number from 1963 and add inflation.
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
They don't do that, nobody does that.
I agree that the poverty line is too low, and I agree that the original idea was not supposed to mean "more than this is ok", but the argument still doesn't really make sense even if the conclusion is correct.
He isn't arguing that they do that, he's saying that if we accept that that remains a reasonable methodology to extrapolate the data, then we can use that methodology to get an updated estimate. He gets his estimate a couple of different ways, and they end up similar.
> "...why the “official” one is still measured at all."
"The official measure provides a consistent historical view of poverty in the United States, but the SPM may be better suited to helping congressional policymakers and other experts understand how taxes and government programs affect the poor. Also, it may better illustrate how certain medical expenses and work-related expenses such as child care can affect a family's economic well-being."
"One of the most important differences between the two measures, however, is that the SPM is intended to be revised periodically, using improved data sources and measurement techniques as they become available, while the official poverty measure is intended to remain consistent over time."
(the most recent poverty report isn't currently downloadable due to the recent government shutdown)
Your question about why the official poverty measure is still used at all is a good one. I'd speculate that if the official poverty measure is tangled up with legislation, it may not be simple for government bureaus to update the measure and eliminate usage of the old measure without someone passing some new laws. If the poverty measure partly defines who does or doesn't receive certain benefits then changing it could be fairly political. If the supplemental poverty measure indicates that e.g. 12% not 10% of families fall below the poverty line, then that implies 20% more funding is necessary for some benefits.
I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:
> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.
We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.
You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.
There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.
It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?
It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.
I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.
The phone point was terrible but he’s not wrong that next to housing, childcare, and healthcare, basically all other expenses hardly matter at all for a family these days, including food.
If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.
[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.
[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.
I think you're just picking at a detail that doesn't alter the picture much. I think we can all agree that having home Internet and a smart phone matter. Cheap phones cost a few hundred, cheap plans cost $40+/person if you use normal amounts of data, not < 5 gigs, home Internet costs $50+, and renting or buying modem type stuff. Amortizing all that might be under $200, but it's probably damn close (or at least circa $140) depending on a lot of details. Particularly if you crack a screen or something every few years.
Yeah the author makes a classic mistake of over arguing the point (potentially because the article was AI generated).
Laser focusing on housing and childcare would have been enough to make the point. Throw healthcare in and it's a solid argument. Get into the weeds on individual expenses and you open yourself up to a lot of nitpicking, which is all over this comment thread
He also way overshoots the target. I absolutely believe the current poverty line is way to low, but trying to argue it should be $140,000 a year is insanity. A lot of people will disregard the overall point of the article just due to that claim alone.
Ignore the bit about food and multipliers. They're not really relevant.
This Orshansky person used estimates and approximations to come up with a rough "this is what it takes to not starve" number, in the absence of sufficient high-quality data to calculate something more precisely.
If you trust inflation / cost of living numbers, they're a measure of how expensive life is overall.
This is the correct way to do things. The methodology of the original SWAG is not relevant to how to update it over time.
.
If you take apart the original estimate into all the different things that made up household expenses, and adjust those separately for price changes and substitutions and such, and our or back together... you're just putting in a ton of extra effort to re-build the "adjust for inflation" calculation from scratch. With tons of room to make mistakes, as demonstrated in the article.
The problem with the "adjust for inflation" methodology, is that inflation is not equal for all components of the basket. The CPI measures the average inflation of the basket, but if some components have grown significantly differently from others.
In particular, some components of the current household budget were not included in the the original cost estimates. So the "inflation adjusted cost of living" doesn't incorporate those aspects, which is why rebuilding the number from scratch gets a result so wildly different from the inflation adjusted number, instead of being a few percent off due to a different methodology.
Dept of Labor [0] says childcare has a median cost of $6,552 to $15,600 (least expensive county to most expensive county). The article appears to be basing their childcare assumptions on the most expensive county (where household incomes are also high), and assuming all families of 4 have two children in childcare.
Yes, childcare is problematically expensive. But one of the core numbers in the article appears to be misleading at best.
I believe they’re using all numbers for a family of four. So two kids. Your numbers are for one kid. Double them and it’s closer to what the article says.
140k is significantly more money than I've ever made in my life.
Where I live, really the line where life becomes a real struggle is about 80k I would say. Below that, you're putting off maintenance, not saving money, the car is accumulating wear that you can't fix, and a medical bill is fatal.
People living way below 80k can only be doing so with significant government assistance.
Can anyone pass independent judgment on how accurate this is? (I mean, yes, he lays out all his sources and logic. I don't know enough to tell whether he's making an accurate assessment of the situation, or is trying to grind some particular axe.)
Because if this is true, it's massive. And it explains so much - starting with why everyone feels the economy is broken.
Minor: Given the examples depend on healthcare and childcare, people aged 65 and older (Medicare, outside average child raising age) fall outside this analysis, and currently a significant part of us population.
(And Medicare, even without additional supplements would have significantly better health outcomes than 1960s)
And if you take the average social security benefit being $48k per household/year, subtract those 2 expenses, either the $31k poverty line is way off or social security is way off
- On the other hand, there's also https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/demo/pove...
which says that there are now two measures: the Official Poverty Measure and the newer Supplemental Poverty Measure that's intended to address some of the problems of the former.
Mention of the Supplemental Poverty Measure doesn't seem to appear in the submitted post using a quick Ctrl-F. Draw your own conclusions.
My experience over a few decades and several home ownerships is that debt plays an outsized role. You are paying a bank first with your mortgage payment, and that csn be 80-90% of your housing cost, which is partially defrayed by a tax writeoff. And the banks basically have a license to print money. We are all working for the banks to some extent. Could this change in the future? You bet it could... but we have to make it happen.
I think it’s mostly bullshit, and a misunderstanding of what poverty is.
Poverty doesn’t mean you can only afford bare minimum stuff and can’t take any vacations or buy luxuries. It means you are struggling.
People in poverty do not have childcare costs, or healthcare, or even housing and transportation (they could be homeless or live with relatives, and either take buses, walk, bike, or get some kind of free ride to work)
Food is truly the only thing people really need. For that, the original amount seems accurate.
Ridiculous to say $100k is the new poverty line. Get a grip.
I feel like the author addresses most of your points well with his comparison of a survival line vs a crisis line.
But re the "people in poverty don't have" a few caveats, in comparison to the 60s, "public" transportation is generally of lower availability and higher priced, single earner households were the norm, and housing was cheaper (addressed).
And while <$100k is pointed to as the line of dimished marginal benefits, in the context of the US median household income being $66k is an indictment of a broken system.
From TFA: "In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries."
He's not saying the average person who was homeless, or living with relatives in 1963 was spending roughly one-third of their income in groceries, it was explicitly families.
You've just No True Scotsmanned your way into redefining what is being discussed. Please read article and firmly secure yourself :)
This was a minor plotline in one episode of The West Wing where they discussed a couple of the details the article gives about it, with the additional claim (which I'm unsure of the truth of) that it was influenced by the creator of it having grown up in the Soviet Union and therefore having incorrect assumptions about how much food prices would influence poverty in the long term. (I forget how it turned out, but I remember that the member of the administration hearing about this was at least initially against updating the poverty line calculation because it would cost them politically for the number of poor people to go up while they were in charge, to which the expert describing the new explanation replied that they already are poor, and the new calculation would just be recognizing that fact).
Notable quotes:
> “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
> It becomes sixteen.
I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three", and thus the conclusion that the "poverty line" is broken seems quite likely.
The conclusion seems likely but this logic doesn't make sense. They don't recalculate a food budget every year and multiply it by three, they take that original 1963 number and add inflation. I think this is dumb, but it's dumb in a completely different way than the article is saying.
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three"
If we assume that general inflation captures the right basket of goods, and that (3 × minimum food) was correct in 1963, then what is actually done (adjusting the result in 1963 by inflation) is correct as well.
That is not what you would get if you computed the minimum food budget now and multiplied by 3; the shifting of the food share of the budget is captured in the CPI.
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share
This is not accurate. There was no such principle. There was an extrapolation technique to use well-measured numbers to calculate a desired but not measured number.
This is not a principle about how things should be calculated, it is a tool for dealing with missing features in a dataset.
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here
The share of goods in people expenses is something governments have been tracking extremely well since the end of the inter-wars period (losing some quality during WWII).
As far as economical measurements go, those are among the best you'll get on the real economy (monetary measurements tend to be more precise).
Pretty sure this is AI written or at least assisted. “It’s not just X, it’s Y. And the foo? It bazzed.”
Honestly hard to disagree with what the message is but I can’t really take him intellectually seriously even with an obvious premise with such lazy writing
Yes, everything after the intro seems to be AI-written. It is lazy and unpleasant to read, but beyond that there are some serious issues of inaccuracy and dishonesty that make this worse than other cases I've seen.
> I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I think this is quoting https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2025/..., where the real quote is "The poverty threshold was originally defined as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and is annually adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)." This isn't buried in a research paper, you paraphrased and then claimed it was a real quote by putting in within quotes, and you failed to cite a source. This is deliberately lying to your readers about the core premise of the whole piece.
The next sentence:
> I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.
That isn't even what your fake quote said.
> In her January 1965 article,
What article? You haven't mentioned this yet, and you still haven't cited a single source.
> ”if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”
This is minor, but again this is an inaccurate quote. The original (https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v28n1/v28n1p3.pdf) says "on an average", not "on average". Two out of two uncited quotes are wrong so far, making the whole piece untrustworthy if it wasn't already.
> “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” — Plutarch
I assumed this one was real but I searched anyway because of the pattern of fake quotes. The first result is an article titled "Fake Plutarch Quotes Are the Newest and Most Facile Ailment of All Arguments About Inequality". This is another fake quote, three for three now.
I'm not going to read the rest of this, even without the trustworthiness issues the bland AI filler is not worth spending any time on. Everyone, please do not do this. Whatever rough notes you were going to feed into the AI are much better, just publish that if you don't have the time or ability to make it "good writing", however you define that.
> The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures each September. The first, called the official poverty measure, is based on cash resources. The second, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). The official poverty measure has remained mostly unchanged since it was introduced in the mid-1960s. In contrast, the SPM was designed to improve as new data and methods become available.
– https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2025/...
I’m not sure how to treat this, but if the official poverty measure is used for practical purposes and not the SPM, the core premise is still entirely valid. I have no idea if that’s the case, and why the “official” one is still measured at all.
The premise is that food is a smaller share of the average budget today, so multiplying a food budget by three is too low. But they don't recalculate a new food budget every year, they literally just take the number from 1963 and add inflation.
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
They don't do that, nobody does that.
I agree that the poverty line is too low, and I agree that the original idea was not supposed to mean "more than this is ok", but the argument still doesn't really make sense even if the conclusion is correct.
He isn't arguing that they do that, he's saying that if we accept that that remains a reasonable methodology to extrapolate the data, then we can use that methodology to get an updated estimate. He gets his estimate a couple of different ways, and they end up similar.
> "...why the “official” one is still measured at all."
"The official measure provides a consistent historical view of poverty in the United States, but the SPM may be better suited to helping congressional policymakers and other experts understand how taxes and government programs affect the poor. Also, it may better illustrate how certain medical expenses and work-related expenses such as child care can affect a family's economic well-being."
"One of the most important differences between the two measures, however, is that the SPM is intended to be revised periodically, using improved data sources and measurement techniques as they become available, while the official poverty measure is intended to remain consistent over time."
Both quotes are from "The Supplemental Poverty Measure: Its Core Concepts, Development, and Use" at https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45031
the census bureau annual poverty report includes both poverty measures: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...
(the most recent poverty report isn't currently downloadable due to the recent government shutdown)
Your question about why the official poverty measure is still used at all is a good one. I'd speculate that if the official poverty measure is tangled up with legislation, it may not be simple for government bureaus to update the measure and eliminate usage of the old measure without someone passing some new laws. If the poverty measure partly defines who does or doesn't receive certain benefits then changing it could be fairly political. If the supplemental poverty measure indicates that e.g. 12% not 10% of families fall below the poverty line, then that implies 20% more funding is necessary for some benefits.
I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:
> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.
We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.
You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.
There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.
It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?
It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.
I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.
The phone point was terrible but he’s not wrong that next to housing, childcare, and healthcare, basically all other expenses hardly matter at all for a family these days, including food.
If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.
[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.
[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.
I think you're just picking at a detail that doesn't alter the picture much. I think we can all agree that having home Internet and a smart phone matter. Cheap phones cost a few hundred, cheap plans cost $40+/person if you use normal amounts of data, not < 5 gigs, home Internet costs $50+, and renting or buying modem type stuff. Amortizing all that might be under $200, but it's probably damn close (or at least circa $140) depending on a lot of details. Particularly if you crack a screen or something every few years.
Yeah the author makes a classic mistake of over arguing the point (potentially because the article was AI generated).
Laser focusing on housing and childcare would have been enough to make the point. Throw healthcare in and it's a solid argument. Get into the weeds on individual expenses and you open yourself up to a lot of nitpicking, which is all over this comment thread
He also way overshoots the target. I absolutely believe the current poverty line is way to low, but trying to argue it should be $140,000 a year is insanity. A lot of people will disregard the overall point of the article just due to that claim alone.
What's your estimate for hardware costs? You can't get phone+service for $20/month. What if they have limited or poor credit?
I think you’re underestimating the age you can leave kids to fend for themselves while you’re at work.
Ignore the bit about food and multipliers. They're not really relevant.
This Orshansky person used estimates and approximations to come up with a rough "this is what it takes to not starve" number, in the absence of sufficient high-quality data to calculate something more precisely.
If you trust inflation / cost of living numbers, they're a measure of how expensive life is overall.
This is the correct way to do things. The methodology of the original SWAG is not relevant to how to update it over time.
.
If you take apart the original estimate into all the different things that made up household expenses, and adjust those separately for price changes and substitutions and such, and our or back together... you're just putting in a ton of extra effort to re-build the "adjust for inflation" calculation from scratch. With tons of room to make mistakes, as demonstrated in the article.
The problem with the "adjust for inflation" methodology, is that inflation is not equal for all components of the basket. The CPI measures the average inflation of the basket, but if some components have grown significantly differently from others.
In particular, some components of the current household budget were not included in the the original cost estimates. So the "inflation adjusted cost of living" doesn't incorporate those aspects, which is why rebuilding the number from scratch gets a result so wildly different from the inflation adjusted number, instead of being a few percent off due to a different methodology.
Dept of Labor [0] says childcare has a median cost of $6,552 to $15,600 (least expensive county to most expensive county). The article appears to be basing their childcare assumptions on the most expensive county (where household incomes are also high), and assuming all families of 4 have two children in childcare.
Yes, childcare is problematically expensive. But one of the core numbers in the article appears to be misleading at best.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/wb/wb20241119
I believe they’re using all numbers for a family of four. So two kids. Your numbers are for one kid. Double them and it’s closer to what the article says.
140k is significantly more money than I've ever made in my life.
Where I live, really the line where life becomes a real struggle is about 80k I would say. Below that, you're putting off maintenance, not saving money, the car is accumulating wear that you can't fix, and a medical bill is fatal.
People living way below 80k can only be doing so with significant government assistance.
80k for a family of 4?
I wish the author dispensed with the mea culpa.
It makes the essay hard to take seriously.
Is this guy actually trying to justify racism?
Can anyone pass independent judgment on how accurate this is? (I mean, yes, he lays out all his sources and logic. I don't know enough to tell whether he's making an accurate assessment of the situation, or is trying to grind some particular axe.)
Because if this is true, it's massive. And it explains so much - starting with why everyone feels the economy is broken.
Minor: Given the examples depend on healthcare and childcare, people aged 65 and older (Medicare, outside average child raising age) fall outside this analysis, and currently a significant part of us population.
(And Medicare, even without additional supplements would have significantly better health outcomes than 1960s)
And if you take the average social security benefit being $48k per household/year, subtract those 2 expenses, either the $31k poverty line is way off or social security is way off
You could just Google it.
- There's https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/about/h... which does say that the Official Poverty Measure is indeed based on food expenses multiplied by three.
- On the other hand, there's also https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/demo/pove... which says that there are now two measures: the Official Poverty Measure and the newer Supplemental Poverty Measure that's intended to address some of the problems of the former.
Mention of the Supplemental Poverty Measure doesn't seem to appear in the submitted post using a quick Ctrl-F. Draw your own conclusions.
My experience over a few decades and several home ownerships is that debt plays an outsized role. You are paying a bank first with your mortgage payment, and that csn be 80-90% of your housing cost, which is partially defrayed by a tax writeoff. And the banks basically have a license to print money. We are all working for the banks to some extent. Could this change in the future? You bet it could... but we have to make it happen.
I think it’s mostly bullshit, and a misunderstanding of what poverty is.
Poverty doesn’t mean you can only afford bare minimum stuff and can’t take any vacations or buy luxuries. It means you are struggling.
People in poverty do not have childcare costs, or healthcare, or even housing and transportation (they could be homeless or live with relatives, and either take buses, walk, bike, or get some kind of free ride to work)
Food is truly the only thing people really need. For that, the original amount seems accurate.
Ridiculous to say $100k is the new poverty line. Get a grip.
I feel like the author addresses most of your points well with his comparison of a survival line vs a crisis line.
But re the "people in poverty don't have" a few caveats, in comparison to the 60s, "public" transportation is generally of lower availability and higher priced, single earner households were the norm, and housing was cheaper (addressed).
And while <$100k is pointed to as the line of dimished marginal benefits, in the context of the US median household income being $66k is an indictment of a broken system.
From TFA: "In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries."
He's not saying the average person who was homeless, or living with relatives in 1963 was spending roughly one-third of their income in groceries, it was explicitly families.
You've just No True Scotsmanned your way into redefining what is being discussed. Please read article and firmly secure yourself :)
> “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I did not know that is how that is calculated. Sigh, that’s not a great way to do that.
This was a minor plotline in one episode of The West Wing where they discussed a couple of the details the article gives about it, with the additional claim (which I'm unsure of the truth of) that it was influenced by the creator of it having grown up in the Soviet Union and therefore having incorrect assumptions about how much food prices would influence poverty in the long term. (I forget how it turned out, but I remember that the member of the administration hearing about this was at least initially against updating the poverty line calculation because it would cost them politically for the number of poor people to go up while they were in charge, to which the expert describing the new explanation replied that they already are poor, and the new calculation would just be recognizing that fact).