UPDATE: Michael Green has written a follow-up post which essentially agrees that $140,000 is not a good national poverty line, but he still has concerns. I have written a new response to his post.
A recent essay by Michael W. Green makes a very bold claim that the poverty line should not be where it is currently set — about $31,200 for a family of four — but should be much higher. He suggests somewhere around $140,000. The essay was originally posted on his Substack, but has now gone somewhat viral and has been reposted at the Free Press. (Note: that actual poverty threshold for a family of four with two kids is $31,812 — a minor difference from Mr. Green’s figure, so not worth dwelling on much, but this is a constant frustration in his essay: he rarely tells us where his numbers come from.)
I think there are at least three major errors Mr. Green makes in the essay:
- He drastically underestimates how much income American families have.
- He drastically overstates how much spending is necessary to support a family, because he uses average spending figures and treats them as minimum amounts.
- He obsesses over the Official Poverty Measure, since it was originally based on the cost of food in the 1960s, and ignores that Census already has a new poverty measure which takes into account food, shelter, clothing, and utility costs: the Supplement Poverty Measure.
I won’t go into great detail about the Official Poverty Measure, as I would recommend you read Scott Winship on this topic. Needless to say, today the OPM (or some multiple of it) is primarily used today for anti-poverty program qualification, not to actually measure how well families are doing today. If we really bumped the Poverty Line about to $140,000, tons of Americans would now qualify for things like Medicaid, SNAP, and federal housing assistance. Does Mr. Green really want 2/3 of Americans to qualify for these programs? I doubt it. Instead, he seems to be interested in measuring how well-off American families are today. So am I.
Let’s dive into the numbers.
1. Measuring Income
Mr. Green’s essay is about income and spending. He mentions income 26 times in the essay. But he never (so far as I can tell) links to any measure of income. The only hard number he references from any data source is median household income, which he mentions several times as $80,000 (note: again this number isn’t quite right: it was $83,730 in 2024). But median household income probably isn’t the best number for his analysis. Households include people living alone, elderly couples, and various non-family structures. His essay primarily focuses on a “family of four (two earners, two kids),” and we have some measures of income that come more closely to approximating this type of family. And they are all much greater than $80,000.
For example, a very readily available number he could have used is median family income, which was a much higher $105,800 in 2024. But that’s all families, regardless of whether they have kids or how many earners they have. For married couples with children (regardless of number of earners), it is a much higher figure: $132,959 in 2024. For families with two earners, median income is even higher: $142,200 in 2024. I can’t find in the publicly calculated Census tables a number for married-couple-dual-earner families with children, but it would likely be in this ~$140,000 range if not higher.
So already we can see that ~$140,000 is not some mythical number that is unattainable by American families. For the type of family Mr. Green is interested in, half of the families are already at this income level. True, that does mean that half are also below it, but the $80,000 figure he keeps using as a baseline isn’t anywhere near the right number. When he says things like “If one parent stays home, the income drops to $40,000 or $50,000” (from the supposed $80,000 baseline), he is drastically understating the financial situation of a typical family.
Again, Mr. Green: “To reach the median household income of $80,000, most families require two earners.” No. The median income for a male that works full-time in the US was $75,440 in 2024. So many narratives about American decline claim that one male income isn’t enough to get by these days. But remember any time you see that median household income figure, this is basically what the median male earns, not what a dual-income family earns. For the median female working full-time, median income is $61,020. If the median male and female full-time worker are married, they earn $136,460 (just adding those two medians together), once again, right in the range that Mr. Green thinks is necessary to support a family of four.
Mr. Green has understated typical family income by something like 70 percent. Knowing this fact alone would, I think, cause him to reconsider his entire essay. But it’s worse than that: he also overstates the amount of spending required to support a family!
2. Family Spending
Mr. Green uses what he calls “conservative, national-average data” to construct a “Basic Needs budget” for our family of four. He lists spending data for childcare, housing, food, transportation, healthcare, and “other essentials” (undefined, but actually his third largest category), then throws in an income tax estimate, to get to a figure of $136,500 as the Basic Needs budget (he also then just refers to this number as $140,000 throughout most of the rest of the essay).
Again, he lists no sources for any of these numbers. I could probably track most of them down, but that would actually miss the main error he makes: he is using average spending levels as minimum spending levels needed to support a family. But the average spending levels probably represent a lot of spending that is not necessary to support a family, but is merely a reflection of how wealthy we are today!
Take food spending. The essay says the family needs to spend $14,717 on food as a minimum. This number probably comes from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which shows a family of four spent $14,325 on food in 2023, and maybe adjusted it up by food inflation since then. But that’s how much a family actually spent, which will include, for example, at least some discretionary dining out experiences: groceries are just 60% of this total!
What’s a better number? Thankfully, the USDA puts out regular estimates of the cost of a “thrifty food plan,” and their reference family is two adults with two kids. Perfect for our purposes. Unfortunately, in 2021 the Biden administration increased the cost of this thrifty food plan by about 21% — that is, above the cost of food inflation — so I’m not totally confident in this number anymore. Nonetheless, the figure can be useful: USDA says it is currently $1,002.20 per month, or about $12,000 per year, for our family of four. Prior to the Biden revision, the figure was $687.40 per month in May 2021, which if we adjust for grocery inflation since then comes to $850 per month or about $10,200 per year.
So $10,000-$12,000 per year is probably a better number, rather than almost $15,000 in Green’s essay. You might say this is only a few thousand dollars, but notice he is overstating food costs by 22-47 percent! If all of the costs are being overstated by 1/3 or so, it no longer takes $118,000 of post-tax income to support the family, but closer to $90,000, already putting us well below median family income.
Are all of the costs as overstated as the food costs? I won’t dive into each category. I can’t even begin to dive into the big $22,000 “other essentials” category, because we don’t know what it is! But let’s talk about housing for a moment. He puts that annual housing costs at $23,267, or $1,938 per month. Is it possible to house a family of four for less than that?
Again, clearly it is. First, we can note that median gross rent in the US was $1,487 in 2024. Of course, most Americans aren’t renters, but rent is a useful figure to use because it generally resets annually at market rates (whereas homeowners are somewhat insulated, so averages including long-term homeowners aren’t especially useful), and we don’t need to add in things like property taxes or maintenance. The rent already reflects those. If that number is reasonable, then housing costs have been overstated by 30 percent.
Can a family of four house themselves for under $1,500 per month? Probably not in NYC. Probably not in LA. But if we look in Chicago, the central city of America’s third largest MSA, we see almost 200 homes for rent that are at least 3 bedrooms and under $1,500. If we look in Dallas-Fort Worth (without going to the outer suburbs), America’s fourth largest MSA, we can find there are currently 350 homes for rent under $1,500 with at least 3 bedrooms on Zillow.
Are all of these rentals perfect? No. Is Zillow a comprehensive listing of rentals? Also, no. So the fact that there are currently hundreds of rentals available in two of America’s largest metro areas that could house a four-person family for less than $1,500, clearly the $1,900 figure is too high (if we expand the search filter to $1,900, we get 760 rentals in Chicago and whopping 2,000 rentals in DFW). The housing figure is probably also 30-40% overstated.
Before leaving the discussion of housing prices, I should emphasize that I am not trying to minimize the housing affordability question. As I have written about numerous times in the past, housing has become much less affordable in recent years. But at the same time, we need not overstate how much it costs. You can certainly pay $2,000 per month if you want, but in most of America you could house a family of four for much less than that.
One final cost I will discuss is childcare. I won’t quibble too much with the number he uses, about $16,000 per child per year, other than to say that childcare costs vary significantly by state, and only a handful of states have an average of $16,000 or more. But the most important thing about childcare costs is that these are temporary costs, thank goodness. Most kids will only be in full-time daycare for a maximum of 5 years, so for a 2-child household this is 10 years of full-time daycare costs, or about $160,000 total over the kids’ younger years.
A median-income female makes that much income in just three calendar years. It doesn’t make sense to put $32,773 into the permanent basic needs budget of a 2-child family, since it is a temporary expense. And it’s also wrong to say, as Green does, that the “second earner is working to pay the stranger watching their children so they can go to work and clear $1-2K extra a month.” The median female is making double the cost of daycare — and yes, while she pays taxes, there are also tax credits. And they are only bearing that full cost for 5 full calendar years, compared with a working career of perhaps 40 years of the second earner’s salary. I’m not saying everyone should choose daycare and two earners! But as with housing, Mr. Green is radically overstating the full impact of this choice on the household budget.
3. Other Poverty Thresholds Exist
Finally, Mr. Green seems to take a lot of issue with the Official Poverty Measure. He is certainly not the first person. Again, read Winship’s essay on this topic for more on the history of this measure. But since Mr. Green is not the first to complain about the OPM, it will not surprise you to learn that there are many alternative measures of poverty that have been developed over the years. A very well-known one, also produced by the Census Bureau, and even included in all of the same reports as the OPM is a newer measure called the Supplemental Poverty Measure.
The SPM overcomes most of the criticisms of the OPM. First, it is not merely linked to a historical cost of food. It is based on, and annually updated with, a budget that includes all of the essential spending categories: food, but also housing, clothing, and utilities. True, it does not include healthcare and childcare, but a low-income family will almost certainly qualify for government healthcare, and a low-income family in the range of these thresholds (as we will see) likely has one primary earner (if they are in the middle of the distribution).
Another way that the SPM is better than the OPM is that it has those housing costs vary by geographic area, unlike the OPM which is a single number for the entire nation (technically, Alaska and Hawaii have different thresholds, but they aren’t radically different). This does mean that for the SPM we can not state one single number for the nation, which makes sense! But it is problematic for this kind of essay. Are the SPMs generally close to the OPM of about $32,000 for a family of four? Or closer to Mr. Green’s $140,000?
The answer is they are much closer to the OPM than Mr. Green’s figures. For research purposes, BLS has created a representative national number for a family of four under the SPM: it’s about $40,000 for renters and homeowners with mortgages. Of course, the nice thing about the SPM is that it takes account of different housing costs, so these numbers vary by location. But the highest is in the San Jose MSA, at almost $60,000 for renters. The NYC MSA is $45,000. Chicago is just $40,000. Little Rock, Arkansas, the MSA that I live in, is $35,000. All of these are higher — in some cases much higher — than the national Official Poverty Measure, however none of them are anywhere near $140,000!
Are the SPM thresholds to be believed? Can you really live in San Jose for $60,000 per year? It would be hard, and you would certainly be living in poverty. But I have no doubt you can find some families in that MSA living on that little. It is a challenging financial situation. It is probably exactly what you think of when you hear the word poverty. But it is not impossible.
Minimum wage in San Jose is about $18/hour, so two workers working not quite full time would hit about $60,000. Average rent there is about $3,000, which would be hard to afford on $60K — it’s half of your income! But keep in mind that the average rent is not something that everyone pays. According to the Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 45 percent of renters in the San Jose MSA are “cost burdened,” meaning they spent at least 30 percent of their income on housing costs (JCHS says median housing costs for renters, including utilities, are about $2,600 per month). That’s a very high number. But people are doing it right now, and it is probably accurate to describe these folks as living in poverty. However, this is a far cry from $140,000, which even in San Jose would mean less than one-quarter of your pre-tax income is going to housing, well below the “cost burden threshold” and rules-of-thumb about housing budgets.
I’ve gone into a bit of detail on San Jose, but keep in mind this is the most expensive MSA in the country. Even there $140,000 is a decent income, enough to get by. But by drilling too deeply into the most expensive MSA, we miss the forest of the rest of the country: in most of the nation, $140,000 is a very high income, but also an income that can very comfortably support a family. Perhaps not in the early years, when you face those high childcare costs, when you are trying to save for that first home, when you have not yet hit your peak earning years. Yes, life can be hard!
But it’s ridiculous to use $140,000 as a poverty measure. And there is no need to reinvent the poverty wheel: Census has already done so with the SPM, overcoming almost every objection to the OPM. Using the more realistic SPM does increase the poverty rate, from 10.6% all the way up to 12.9% in 2024. But it gets you nowhere near the 2/3 of families that Mr. Green identifies as being in poverty.
Finally, perhaps the SPM isn’t a perfect measure of poverty either! Researchers continue to come up with new methods, as in this 128-page summary report from the Interagency Technical Working Group on
Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty from 2021. Perhaps some day we will have an even better measure than the SPM (one of the recommendations from the working group is to account for healthcare costs), but if we do get such as measure it will be based on carefully calculating how much income is needed to support a family, not wildly adding together overinflation national spending averages.
Economist Writing Every Day 
Simplifying – would it be fair to say that Mr. Lewis’ $140k income for a family of 4 represents a somewhat arbitrary, but reasonable, marker of middle class living?
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Have you lived below the poverty line? Have you seen the rise in homelessness. You also don’t take Healthcare into account, or people with disabilities who have additional costs (supplies not covered by insurance, use ride share because you can’t drive and there isn’t public transit).
Take a walk around Trenton, NJ.
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i would
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No. As I say in the post, he is overstating the cost by at least 30%.
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Sorry if I’m misunderstanding things (your article reads almost like “A Modest Proposal”), but the takeaway should be that you disagree with the final number reached by Green, but you still support the underlying message right? because 70% of 140k is still 98k, meaning that families under 6 figures are in poverty.
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Wouldn’t the SPM be a better threshold than these back-of-the-envelope calculations?
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Yes, see section 3 of my post
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Good post! But measuring income of couples that *already have children* is a form of selection bias, and misses those who are priced out of having children. (I read the original author as less about poverty line, more about financial pressure on young families)
140k is clearly a bad number, but I think the exercise of looking at cost of living for targeted points is as informative as “median wages grew faster than cpu, averaged across ~330m people”. I liked your older post on “Affording a second child”, as it’s closer to a lived experience. For example, 32yr old couple, renting a 1BR, with a 1 year old, debating a second child will rightly project that expanding to a second child and second bedroom may press them into a deep financial hole. That is harder to measure, but is closer how a real person feels affordability rather than aggregate statistics.
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What Mr. Horpedahl appears to miss is not whether Mr. Green’s logic and numbers are sound, but rather, whether they resonate with the overwhelming majority of Americans (not simply the typical readers of both articles’ authors) and why. They do, and the reason is that the large majority are suffering, deeply. They are suffering from their struggles to survive, from the intense pressure that comes every day to make it through to the next, from the frustration they feel when economists and politicians alike supplant the expressions of their suffering with rationales for why they are misinterpreting their own suffering as something else. You might as well just come out and say it: “Let them eat cake.” Where were you people on No Kings Day? Do you seriously believe that was entirely about Donald Trump?
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I’m not really sure what “resonate” means in this context, but my guess is that the “overwhelming majority of Americans” have never paid anywhere close to $33,000 for childcare or anything close to it.
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But… that’s the point. They don’t pay it because they can’t, not because they don’t need it. Poverty is the state of going without. They need the childcare, but instead they lean on other moms or leave their kids home alone or force older children to take care of younger ones, probably well before they’re ready. Being in poverty is loaded with unpaid labor, and if you don’t factor that in, you’re not seeing the whole picture.
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$17,000 for childcare per year comes from Essex County, NJ, which is not representative of the nation. Using the same MIT Living Wage Calculator he used, we can see that large states like Texas and Florida have costs around $10,000 per child, so his number is 70% (!) too high.
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I pay $22K a year for one kid 5 days a week ($85 a day) and that’s market rate in my area (which is not NY/LA/SF/etc.). We want a second child so that will jump to $44K for a couple years if we are successful.
And while that is “temporary,” childcare costs do NOT go to $0 once school starts. School lets out several hours before most jobs do, they are closed in the summer, and routinely close throughout the year for winter/spring breaks, random holidays that most businesses don’t recognize, and snow days/admin days/etc. It’s also quasi-illegal to leave any child younger than 12-13 alone by themselves. If you don’t have local family members willing to do it for free, childcare costs are a boat anchor that families have to carry for over a decade.
You’re right though, most families don’t pay that. Because they can’t. So they make decisions like not having children in the first place. Or like going deeply into debt. Or they use “off the books” child care that keeps costs down by breaking the law a hundred different ways.
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Michael, it seems like you are saying that it doesn’t matter whether Mr. Green’s post is true, but only whether people feel it’s true. The rejection of objective truth is not unprecedented, but it is a radical step. If that is how you feel, what is the point of rational debate at all? Why even include numbers in your argument?
If something feels true to people, but isn’t, I agree that it is still worth talking about. But we shouldn’t we at least be open to the possibility that people aren’t suffering because they are in literal poverty, but instead for some other reason, while they latch onto that idea because it is comforting and because it is endlessly argued for (incorrectly) by professional pundit and essayists?
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Exactly!
How dare he let numbers and logic get in the way of a good vibe…
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Yes, it is easy to tear apart Mr. Green’s essay, and demonstrate lax processes for his determinations.In doing so you’re missing the point.Mr. Green is pointing out a very valid, vast, (and I’d argue obvious) discrepancy between what the government has long inaccurately (and I’d argue arbitrarily)) demarcated as a “poverty line,” and the actual level at which people cannot realistically afford their most basic needs. Certainly, this line is well above $31,812 for a family of four.Your rebuttal to his figure of $140,000 as a demarcation of “necessary income” is dismissive of the disparity to which he is rightly attempting to draw attention.
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Please read section 3 of my essay, where I discuss alternative poverty measures
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Thank you. I did see it. It contributed to my opinion that your essay is dismissive of the problem.
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Before you debate merits of the analysis consider its source. Who is Michael W Green? He worked in Peter Thiel’s family office, took start up funding from George Soros, has no Wikipedia page, and claims in his substack post Part 1: My Life is a Lie that putting him and his siblings through college was so financially challenging that it drove his mother insane. I’m not buying any of it. He’s trying to scare 401k investors out of low fee index funds by claiming that those funds could contribute to a market crash. He’s adding fuel to the slowly building smoldering fire of working class resentment that stems from the realization that they’ve been taken for what little they ever did own or could one day have owned. More shiny things to distract and confuse while the super rich continue with their plan to own everything.
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I make $80k a year and I can’t afford a one bedroom apartment anywhere in South Florida. I know, I should lower my expectations and live in the ghetto or move out and take a $25k pay cut and be in the same position somewhere else with even less opportunities.
The hilarious part to me is that I used to have a one bedroom apartment when I was a kid fresh out of high school, working a dead end telemarketing job that paid 1.5x minimum wage, before 2020.
Then I did something incredibly stupid. I wasted 4 years getting an engineering degree thinking I could pull myself up and build this country.
What a joke that was, especially after the lockdowns.
There is a bright side to all of this though!
I found peace with the idea that it’s hopeless to try anymore, and I’m not afraid of renting some garage and parking my car in there, with the engine running, while I take a long nap.
”Oh no, please don’t, we need you.”
No. You don’t. Not unless you just need me to slave away to pay more taxes for dual citizens or to exist to simply keep up the appearance of all of us suffering together, equally.
I’ll pass.
The machine is broken and it’s past the point of no return.
Furthermore, I reached the level of demoralization where I want nothing more than to leave this miserable existence and pass this problem on to those who choose to endure and think you can vote your way out of this.
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There are a lot of places to rent in South Florida for less than $2k/month…
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_rent/?searchQueryState=%7B%22isMapVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapBounds%22%3A%7B%22west%22%3A-81.42387723828126%2C%22east%22%3A-79.26506376171876%2C%22south%22%3A25.03319306119555%2C%22north%22%3A26.36956948216816%7D%2C%22filterState%22%3A%7B%22sort%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3A%22paymenta%22%7D%2C%22fr%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%2C%22fsba%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22fsbo%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22nc%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22cmsn%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22auc%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22fore%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Afalse%7D%2C%22beds%22%3A%7B%22min%22%3A2%2C%22max%22%3A2%7D%2C%22baths%22%3A%7B%22min%22%3A2%2C%22max%22%3Anull%7D%2C%22sqft%22%3A%7B%22min%22%3A1250%2C%22max%22%3Anull%7D%2C%22mp%22%3A%7B%22max%22%3A2000%7D%7D%2C%22isListVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapZoom%22%3A9%7D
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Since quibbling is the place you’ve taken this. Let’s do some.
There is very little chance that many urban dwellers are spending $212/wk on groceries for a family of 4. We’re pretty frugal with the grocery bill and we spend $200/wk on a family of 3 in Kansas City. Can you do it? Maybe. What are you buying? Not much of quality or variety or of healthy. That’s kind of the definition of living at the poverty line.
A lovely find of 200 houses in Chicago under $1,500. That represents something like 0.002% of Chicago households. Way to solve that housing problem.
Really, just missing the point.
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USDA is very transparent and precise about what is in the Thrifty Food Plan. See Table 1 here for the reference family: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-files/TFP2021.pdf
Those prices are from mid-2021, so they will be on average 23% higher today, but those are the quantities of food they are using.
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The point about Chicago is that even though it is a slightly above average cost city (110.7% for housing according to BEA RPP), you can still find homes below the national median rent. 0.002% isn’t a relevant number — at any given moment, only a very small percent of units are on the market, especially when we just use one website (primarily geared towards selling homes, not renting). The point is that sub-$1,500 rentals do exist (though not in Essex County, NJ, which we now know that Mr. Green used).
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Your rebuttal is not convincing. You seem to nitpick (inaccurately at times) Mr. Greene’s article. A few examples:
Poverty Threshold – Green states “The official poverty line for a family of four in 2024 is $31,200”, you state $31,812 but the official HHS number is $31,200.
OPM vs SPM – Green uses OPM to make his point. You want to use SPM, but SPM includes income private and government sources, SNAP, housing subsidies, and other government assistance. Where Green is showing what you need to avoid those programs and the trap increased income has when you no longer qualify for those programs.
Basic Needs Budget – Green’s argument is that it takes roughly $140k to meet your basic needs. The numbers he shows are the averages in the US. For food, you want him to use the “thrifty food plan” instead of the “moderate cost plan” that has been described as a more accurate figure for “average”.
Average Annual Housing Costs – You want to give examples of housing costs below the US Government’s BLS derived average of $25,436 (Mr. Green uses $23,267). And maybe there is a better source but Mr. Green isn’t just making it up as you seem to suggest.
Mr. Green uses median and averages for his arguments consistently – while this may not be the best measure, he isn’t cherry-picking to support his argument. While your article seems to do so. At the end of the day, he is simply stating the average costs for a family of 4 to meet their needs is roughly $140,000, no big vacations, savings, etc. Not necessarily poverty, but the threshold income a family needs to pay their bills. Unexpected expenses or a loss of income is devastating for an average family of 4 with average expenses making roughly $140k.
It seems to little uncredentialed me that Mr. Green is on to something, even if everything doesn’t line up to how you would present it.
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Mr. Green has already started in a followup post that $140K is way too high. He has conceded that point, and moved on to other arguments.
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He has conceded that he chose the county in New Jersey because it was the subject of a prior article of his. He goes on to argue that the location picked is akin to bark on a tree, pick any place in America and the same story unfolds.
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He conceded they aren’t nationally representative numbers, which was his claim in the original post. And criticizing that was my point in this post.
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Very well, though you leave the reader unassured that his reflections on the disease as a whole are off base, even discounting one symptom.
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Check the blog tomorrow morning!
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I would agree that the $140K is absurdly high and poorly defined, but your housing numbers are aren’t much better. Using median rent figures that are dominated by 1 & 2 bedroom apartments seriously understates the true costs of housing. Using median SFR rents would be a better proxy, since they are majority 3+ BR, but actually filtering all rents to 3+ BR would be a better, and that is over $2K/month.
However, as every parent knows the bigger issue you skip is school districts. Just from a quick look at Zillow, I can see that the overwhelming majority of those 350ish Dallas rentals (out of its 1+ million housing units) are in low/under-performing school districts. There are plenty of econometric analysis reports about the effect of school performance on housing costs, and any economic housing analysis for families that does not include any adjustments for school districting is too generic to be real.
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Your argument would be more valid if the discussion is what it takes to be middle class.
But the discussion is about what it takes not to be in poverty.
To say nothing of the fact that the discussion leaves out the government transfers that lower income people receive
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RE: Housing costs
When I read Mr. Green’s essay I interpreted it as a minimum housing cost that most people would agree is a safe place to raise children and with acceptable public schools. Not an ideal place, but an acceptable place. Every metro area has “below average” apartments for rent but they are generally in unsafe areas with horrible schools. You can make it work while you are young and without children but anyone who has to raise their family there is going to be resentful about it. The apartments themselves often present their own hazards (lead paint/pipes, asbestos, proximity to industrial sites and other sources of pollution, etc.). Anyone who can afford to leave these places does so I didn’t take issue with the estimate he used.
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RE: $140k Poverty Line
It depends where you live but the back-of-the-envelope number I had in my head for the “real world” poverty line is about $100K for a family of 4 if both parents have to work full time and you didn’t buy a house before 2020. And even that is going to require some gymnastics to get the childcare piece of it because you won’t be able to afford “market rate” child care in most areas. Without a lot of parental support (money, housing, and/or childcare), it gets really sketchy trying to make a go of it on less than that. You will be living on the edge, a job loss or a health problem away from ruin. No savings. A set of new tires or a similar repair for your car is a crushing blow you have to put on a credit card. Grocery shopping fills you with dread. Your retirement plan is work until you die, etc. If you want to say that’s not “real poverty” because you aren’t starving in the street then fine, but you are arguing semantics. The lived experience of you and your spouse both working to raise a family on <$100k in most areas will be one of deprivation and a constant sense that the world around you is for “other people,” and not you.
So is $140k too high? Maybe, though I think it rings true in the spirit of what Mr. Green was saying. I found some of his estimates questionably high, though others were actually understated based on my personal experience. If you are anywhere near the median household income and have young children, you are fighting for your life right now though. That’s the point and it explains the anger and instability we are witnessing right now. If you have a young family, you need to earn well above the median to really feel like you have what you need and the system “works” for people like you.
The cost increases haven’t stopped either, another piece that is left out of the criticisms of the $140k number. Cost of living is a runaway train and this has been going on for years with no sign of slowing down. Today is just one snapshot in time and that means little to the people who are thinking about the years ahead and wondering how they are supposed to make it.
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Maybe people don’t know what ‘poor’ means? It does not mean one dollar less than median… relative poverty is not problematic, absolute poverty is. Not having enough food, or heat, or clean water. “I don’t like this school district…” ah.
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