This is an insightful but deeply upsetting article about why everyone in the US feels poor, and why the current political situation emerges as a direct result.
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This is an insightful but deeply upsetting article about why everyone in the US feels poor, and why the current political situation emerges as a direct result.
TL;DR: the *actual* poverty line in the US for a family of four with two young children is about $140,000, and there isn't much improvement in quality of life between $40K and $100K.
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This is an insightful but deeply upsetting article about why everyone in the US feels poor, and why the current political situation emerges as a direct result.
TL;DR: the *actual* poverty line in the US for a family of four with two young children is about $140,000, and there isn't much improvement in quality of life between $40K and $100K.
JFC, this section has me infuriated every time I reread it.
But there was one number I had somehow never interrogated. One number that I simply accepted, the way a child accepts gravity.
The poverty line.
I don’t know why. It seemed apolitical, an actuarial fact calculated by serious people in government offices. A line someone else drew decades ago that we use to define who is “poor,” who is “middle class,” and who deserves help. It was infrastructure—invisible, unquestioned, foundational.
This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, 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.”
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