- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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I live alone in a moderately low cost of living area making about 52k take home. With no extenuating expenses related to health I can put away a hundred or two a month after rent, gas, utilities, food and car maintenance (I drive and fix old shit myself rather than make a car payment). But that is literally all I can do. If I had a second person to support or was in any other area I’d be underwater quick.
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.
I get what you’re saying but some people 22-25 are still hoping to start a family or buy a house.
who? the ultra religious/conservative types?
22-25 is way too young to be doing either of those things.
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.
That doesn’t even buy a single politician.
I thought I heard Sam Bankman-Fried say he was surprised at how little it cost, it was like $50k or something.
State level politicians are like $5k-$10k. Shockingly cheap but you do need to buy most of the set.
Yes. That as a household income is not actually that far from two median individual incomes. As someone in a high cost of living area, I can see you’d be very restricted on less than that, and it’s tough to see how you’d ever afford to own a home.
God I wish that were me
No, it’s not. Having to use a budget and not spending whatever you want on anything you want at any time is not poverty. Fuck off with this.
I think the headline is a little misleading.
My gut reaction was the same as yours, but after reading the article I don’t think they are far off.
$140,000 for a family of four in certain locations could be doing very poorly.
After taxes, it’s about $110,000 a year. According to a few sits I found when seaching, the per year cost of a child varies by state. In NY, it’s approx $30k per year. So, for a family of four with two kids that $50k-60k a year.
That leaves about $60k a year. Housing costs in NY is approx $4.3k a month for a 3br house. . That’s $51,600 a year.
You now have $8,400 left for the utilities, food, clothing, etc.
The current federal poverty level is roughly $30k/yr which is basically impossible to make work.
This is highly dependant on where you live, as has been said before.
The answer is NO, it’s not. However, to be completely fair, I’ve bookmarked the “supporting materials” to give it a review later when I have a little more time.
As someone who grew up in a family actually straggling the poverty line, there’s simply 0% chance that any family anywhere in this country is living in poverty with that kind of income. It’s well above what most households are bringing in, and while there may be a limited subset of circumstances where that money isn’t sufficient, that’s not what poverty is.
And I read through some of the comments in this thread – Assuming they’ve come from real humans not pushing an agenda, it makes me ashamed to be associated with those people.
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.
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.
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%.
This makes way more sense. Thanks for the explanation.
Unfortunately, no it doesn’t address that point. It’s basically, if you pervert the definition from a century ago and interpret it in one specific way for a way of life that’s hardly anywhere close to the standard/average, then you can maybe make a clickbait case for a super high income that drives engagement. Think of the click through and comments!
So what you’re saying is, if you’re not on the brink of starvation and/or homelessness you’re not poor?
Like, someone who hasn’t been able to afford vacations or any other luxury, is one medical issue or car issue away from homelessness, and doesn’t go to the doctor for routine/preventative stuff because it’s too expensive, isn’t poor. So long as they pay rent on time and eat three meals a day.
It’s not the line between being poor or not, it’s the poverty line and what you’re describing would be considered poverty.
No, what I’m saying is $140,000 is not the new poverty line for Americans.
dude, everyone is one medical issue away from bankrupcy. if i got cancer i’d go bankrupt.
yes, as long as you pay rent, have heat, and other necessities you’re not poor in in poverty.
i don’t know what your standard is, but i grew up with a roof over my head, food in my belly, and zero luxuries. we were considered middle class. not poor. our houses were old and crappy, and our cars were used based models. the only ‘luxury’ we had was cable tv.
the issue is now ‘middle class’ seems to mean ‘upper middle class’ as if if you can’t lve in the best towns, with teh best schools, and travel to europe with your family every year, you are ‘poor’. where i live people lve in posh expensive years, have the $5000 in electronics or more, are leasing new model cars, and traveling abroad 2-3x a year and claim they are ‘in poverty’. because their salary is ‘only’ 100K.
What? You’re not making any sense.
Well shit thats a little Less than 3x what I make lol. 💀💀💀💀
“a family of four needs $136,500 a year”
I could see that, more likely in more expensive areas. You aren’t getting anywhere in New York or San Francisco on $140K.
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!
How much is your rent, if it’s not too much to ask?
we live with family, maintain the property and shit. that’s our rent. given our locale it comes out to about 15k/yr net we’re saving.
probably should have put that in your original comment tbh. You implied one can make it on ~$70k near SF as if your bills were 1:1
i’m disabled. my medical care costs more than rent would. should i have included that too?
Yes. That seems pretty relevant to your financial story.
well, if you’re comparing your income to the average, then yes, anything that substantially puts you out of the average would be pertinent for a comparison
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?
It should be localized. it cuts both ways. Why would we say a family struggling to make ends meet is not really poor because they could live comfortably on that salary in a different region?
in New York or San Francisco on $140K.
A month?
you can still live in those areas with that income lol, unless you buying multimillionaire penthouses.
plenty of people live in these cities on less than 140K and are doing fine.
I live in Boston and I do great and a few years ago I was only making 70K.
I’m not sure what are the living standards in Boston or even if those exist, but good for you.
Boston scares and mystifies me and I know nothing of your bizarre customs.
it’s a city with a lot of money. but nobody shows it off the way they do in nyc/la. it’s very ‘modest’.
people with 50million in the bank drive a 30K prius and wear eddie bauer and agonizing over their property tax going up $500 as if it will bankrupt them.
No.
Yes. If you actually read what that means.
Does a single person need $140k? No.
Does a family with kids in a city? Yes.
That number is for a family of four. Could you imagine trying to pay today’s costs to raise a family of four? You would basically need six figures
I read the article just fine, actually. If you actually understand what poverty means, you wouldn’t make such a ridiculous claim. It’d have to be a really high cost-of-living city for that to be the case, but there are a lot of cities where a family can raise children on $140k easily. Affordability these days is difficult in general, I understand the frustration, and it’s probably why people downvoted me by reflex, but creating a poverty line off cherry-picked conditions doesn’t make any sense.
What is poverty to you?
The line has always been arbitrary.
when you can’t pay for necessities. food, housing, clothing.
if you can afford these things. you aren’t in poverty.
How much food, housing, and clothing?
If you have a family of 5 living in a 1 bedroom unit eating mac and cheese every night, they’re technically housed and fed. Most people would say that’s poverty though.
That’s why I say the line has always been arbitrary.
depends on who you ask. depends on the size of the bedroom.
for a rich person, it would be a much higher threshold than for those who are poor. that’s all about ‘standards’ of living.
i grew up on canned/frozen foods, and yeah ate a shitload of mac and cheese and other horrible foods. i hate plenty of calories, even if they were unhealthy. but it’s what we could afford. i also only had cheap fall apart clothes. but i was never hungry, or cold. i didn’t shared a bedroom, but many of my friends did. like a lot of poor people, we spent more on certain things like clothes because we could not afford nicer things that lasted longer. but where i lived… everyone was like that so it wasn’t a big deal.
most of my peers where i live now, think i grew up in poverty, because they grew up much wealthier. i’ve been on first dates where the person lecture me how my parents were irresponsible to have me if they could not afford to pay for my college or buy me a new car at 16, etc. i usually laugh at their absurdly high standards, but to them it is a ‘bare minimum’ and anyone who doesn’t have those things shouldn’t exist.
for a family of 5 living in a 1 bedroom eating shitty food, any minor improvement would feel like a huge success. but waht rich people don’t get about poor people is they tend to appreciate that they aren’t homeless and starving, and don’t really have a concept of nicer/healthier food because it doesn’t exist in their social peer group. i never ate healthy food until i got to college because it was the first time in my life it was ever available to me. nobody in my rural working-class down ate that stuff, just like we didn’t go to live performances, own luxury cars, or a ton of other stuff.
None of that changes the fact that poverty is still an arbitrary line.
I also never went hungry or cold, but had the power turned off at the house probably a half dozen times growing up because the bill got too far behind. Pretty sure my mother went hungry a few times to make sure we ate, but she always hid it. I shared a room with a sibling until I moved out. I’d argue I did grow up in poverty.
That being said, I have travelled through China, and pooped through a hole in the bottom of a moving train where people lived in a shack next to the train line with no running water or electricity at all. Those people also live in poverty, far worse than what I experienced.
So as a developed country, why can’t we set the poverty line at a level where we WANT people to be? The line itself is just a tool to help us better set policies to reduce the number of people on one side of the line. Set it too high and it’s difficult to move people across it, but set it too low and you’re not helping a large number of people who aren’t in a situation that is reasonable. There isn’t any reason why we can’t feed and house everyone with running water and electricity in this country, even with healthy food. So that should definitely be required. I’d argue, like the original article though, that other things should also be included. Like kids having access to a decent education, youth and adult participation in physical activities like sports, and the transportation required to get around (be that public transit in cities, or a personal vehicle in more rural locations)
in a city
There’s your problem. Supply, demand, and entitlement.
Solution: move to a small town, Mr/Mrs Entitlement! Somewhere cheaper to live, where coincidentally the pay is lower and opportunities aren’t as abundant. Also extremely limited mass-transit options but hey that’s why you buy a car and get tied up in that whole mess. Not to mention property values doubling/tripling post-covid but I’m sure most folks have a few $100k laying around, especially in these particularly prosperous times.
Perhaps it’s just a skill issue though? Lol
The fact that cars are necessary is really awful for poor people. I’m driving a 28-year-old car if a salvage title and I’m still paying hundreds for gasoline insurance and keeping fluids in it since it leaks oil, and that’s when it’s not burning the oil, because anything else would be unaffordable. We really need to stretch out grade separated rail Transit as deep into the suburbs as possible and then densify around it
It’s really not as bad as you make it sound. Have you ever lived here?
I grew up in a car-centric suburb and I never want to live there again. It’s worse on most metrics. Transit sucks. Fewer options for food, entertainment, socializing, etc.
Also vastly fewer cultural and social options. Poor people don’t deserve those things, I guess!
Poor people deserve to suffer, is an opinion far too many people hold.
the fact that you made this comparison tells me you are rich
I grew up in a rural area 2 hours city of the city, because it’s all we could afford. i had no culture into i got to college.
am i suppose to feel like i was therefore impoverished or something?
because it’s all we could afford
…
am i suppose to feel like i was therefore impoverished or something?
Sounds like yes? You’re saying yes. I don’t understand your question.
I never felt impoverished until rich people told me i shouldn’t be alive because my life doesn’t meet there inflated living standards.
Just like my 150K a year salary feels rich to me, and they tell me it’s shameful and a poverty wage.
What you don’t understand is that you don’t get to determine how other people live, or their living standards. They do.
You can feel bad for people like me for ‘suffering’, but what you don’t get is that to us it was never suffering. it was a normal life. If you think my life was impoverished, it’s likely because your own was so privledged. and to think anyone who doesn’t live their life by your standards is ‘less than’ you is pure arrogance.
So we should just sprawl out huh? That’s just making unsustainable towns.
Versus living in a shoebox like this permanently?
I’ll take suburban sprawl over this any day of the week.
Also Suburbia isn’t that much cheaper, especially these days. It’s just worse. Rural areas are cheaper but you have lower wages that offset that so it’s not even like you could just move out to Nowhere County anymore
“Entitlement?”
Back in 1960, minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the average US home was $11,000.00
A brand new high school graduate could be a homeowner in a decade.
Please explain to me how anyone wanting to be able to live like that is ‘entitled.’
The new American dream is having a giant polycule and splitting a home between several paying adults
That actually does sound cool.
Damn entitled people, wanting to live within 4 hours of where they work…
There’s your problem. Supply, demand
Unfortunately true. Housing prices being regulated by supply and demand is the problem. Housing is a human right and should be guaranteed to everyone. Spot on, comrade!
Yes. The people saying no are no longer temporarily embarrassed millionaires but temporarily embarrassed middle class. Have or have not, and 140k is have not given inflation, healthcare, education, food, rent/mortgage, energy etc.
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.
how many kids do you have and how much of your income is going towards their education/childcare?
No.
Like there is a figure low enough for either party.
uh huh, thank you vice and mr wallstreet substack poster for spreading such awareness, but where does that leave people in actual poverty?
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.
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.
…we’re getting soylent green instead. they all agree on that.
Maybe. Depends on where you live. If you live somewhere relatively inexpensive it’s not bad. However, I’d have to caution that this sounds like gross income (I did a search and the article didn’t say), and if it is, this isn’t great. Taxes, medical, any union dues, and hopefully a significant chunk going into a retirement fund will eat this up quickly. This is in the 24% fed tax bracket - not including child credit or any pre-tax deductions for something like a 401k, and no State tax taken. 140k take-home would be pretty good.
