The issue is... how do you accurately determine the poverty line without just taking some number and multiplying it. Because not only do costs vary by location, so does their ratio. So you really need a set of costs per location added together, then averaged based on the density of population in the area the costs were pulled from. And of course at that point the finaly number is probably true nowhere. So what is the use of it anyway. Each specific area needs it's own poverty line. The smaller the area the more useful and accurate the number will be. But you can't just say "fine, we will do it by zipcode". Because zipcodes have significant variation of sizes. It needs to be done intelligently and constantly as things shift. So in the end, there simply is no reasonably accurate poverty line unless a human calculates it for a specific address.

The poverty line is about 32K for a family of four, and 15K for a single person.

fed minimum wage full time is a income of 15K per year. this of course, varies by state, w/ CA min wage becoming 36K a year.

ISTG there are more commenters up in here who obviously didn't read the article than ones who did.