The wealthy really fucked us over, hey. They're scum for what they did.

Same and I live in what would be considered a rural state. We don't have any big cities and a studio apartment would cost me about $1500 a month about 50 miles outside our biggest city and $1800+ within 50 miles of Portland Maine which is our biggest city. This shit is out of control. Our wages are more in line with a rural state, but our rent prices are near what you'd expect in a bigger city.

I thought I heard Sam Bankman-Fried say he was surprised at how little it cost, it was like $50k or something.

It's mentioned in the substack article that for a single individual his calculations place the poverty line around 50k, while 140k is for a family.

yeah but is your income going to go up? or are you like 50 and it's maxxed out?

context is everything. if you're 25 and your salary will double in 5-10 years your situation isn't bad.

blows my mind in my city how many 22-25 year olds scream how poor they are when they are just starting out their lives and think their 50-60K wage is 'poverty' when it will be 100K in 5 years.

in New York or San Francisco on $140K.

A month?

The poverty line is for the nation overall. Using some of the highest cost of living areas to set it doesn't make sense. Why would you say a family making considerably more than most of their peers is poor because they would struggle to afford living somewhere else entirely?

I mean, we're poor but we make less than half that just outside San Francisco. Honestly we're doing okay. We don't get any of the luxuries my parents had at our age, but we have smartphones so we can never get away from anything!

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.

This calculation is for a family of four. Please read more than the headline and comments.

This calculation is for a family of four. Please read more than the headline and comments.

If my wife and I both made 70k I think we could comfortably raise 2 kids.

As is? We would need some serious help.

Math that a lot of us educated poverty-livers have done before. Its refreshing to see one of the econ-bros validate it.

140K is more 85% of the USA population.

It's upper middle class. it's about 5 grand a month in disposable income. assuming a 1/3 tax rate and 3K in rent/mortage

it's also what I make, and yeah i have that much disposable income per month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_income_thresholds

TL;DR: "The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation."

“laughable,” arguing that you can’t declare the majority of Americans impoverished because the suburbs they choose to live in are expensive, which is what Green did when he used the middle class suburb of Caldwell, New Jersey, as his median.

Yeah you're right, this is verging on dishonest. The whole point of him picking Caldwell, NJ was to find an extremely median place to live and avoid accusations of cherry-picking San Francisco or Manhattan prices. Essex county is 13th out of 21 counties in NJ for income, NJ is the 11th largest state by population. I'm sure you could find something more mundane, but not that would affect the final numbers to any significant degree unless you were cherry-picking in the other direction.

Sure there's lots of states with much lower property values, but you have to weight it based on where people actually live. Telling poor people to move to Buttfuck, ID and get a job there instead doesn't work.

Uh... right where they are? The American welfare state is insufficient across the board, so it needs to be strengthened across the board, and employers across the board should be forced to pay living wages.

Well he addresses that, the lowest level gets some assistance. Once you reach a certain income to climb out you lose the assistance and effectively are back in poverty again.

vast majority people in actual poverty spend their lifetime in poverty. about 10% make it out, mostly via education for gifted kids.

You really should read the article before commenting. I know you are not alone in this thread don't feel singled out, but they make a very good point.

there's simply 0% chance that any family anywhere in this country is living in poverty with that kind of income.

The original Substack addresses this point, but the short of it is: Most income gains from 35k to 100k are cancelled out by a loss of government benefits, so there's a lot less difference between these than you'd expect. You only start making real gains starting from 100k. Now a family making 100k will have expendable income that's true, but the vast majority of its income will still go towards essentials so it's still one emergency away from insolvency.

Edit: This means that a family with two incomes and two young children making 50k is getting a market price equivalent of 50k in government benefits, so we can crudely approximate families straddling the poverty line as making 100k net. In that case the difference between the effective official poverty line and the proposed poverty line is a large but realistic 40%.

and while there may be a limited subset of circumstances where that money isn’t sufficient, that’s not what poverty is.

bingo. where i live everyone thinks they are in 'poverty' because they can't afford luxuries like expensive cars, expensive vacations, and luxury housing. they are not anywhere near true poverty. but since most grew up wealthy/middle class, they think they are.

as someone who grew up lower-class, it blows my mind how poor most people are with money, and how they blame society rather than their own budgeting skills. i know people who make 40K a year who spend 10K a year traveling, and then cry poor.