Why the real poverty line is $140,000, this strategist argues

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• tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  One last point he makes is the personal savings rate soared during lockdowns, as key costs like childcare and commuting vanished. “When the world reopened, the costs returned, but now inflated by 20%. The rage we feel today is the hangover from that brief moment where the American Option was momentarily back in the money,” he says.

  So people were actually better off during the pandemic. smh

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  • Schmoo@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    You have to remember that a lot of people weren’t working or getting paid either, so even though their expenses went down many were still struggling.

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    • yes_this_time@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      Right, it’s important to remember that for many folk they still had to go into work everyday, they tend not to be the people that have time to blog and wax nostalgic on the glory days of the pandemic. (Not directed at you or the parent, just a comment)

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• Hegar@fedia.io ⁨49⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

  Another point he makes is that the safety net does catch people at the very bottom, but traps anyone who climbs out. For instance, at $45,000, they lose Medicaid eligibility; at $65,000, childcare subsidies vanish.
  “In option terms, the government has sold a call option to the poor, but they’ve rigged the gamma. As you move ‘closer to the money’ (self-sufficiency), the delta collapses. For every dollar of effort you put in, the system confiscates 70 to 100 cents,” he says. “No rational trader would take that trade. Yet we wonder why labor force participation lags. It’s not a mystery. It’s math.”

  What? How does the system take 70-100 cents of every dollar of effort put in by low income people? Medicaid and childcare subsidies going away isn't 70-100% of the income of a household earning 65k.

  Obviously losing medicaid or childcare subsidies is a huge blow for anyone, but i don't understand where he's pulling 70-100% of the value of someone's labour from.

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨38⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    It is 70-100% of the extra money they make compared to someone earning around 30k.

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  So food at home is no longer 33% of household spending, it’s somewhere between 5% and 7%.

  NBC News is tracking changes in the prices of eggs, bread, ground beef, chicken and other grocery items to monitor the impact on consumers’ food bills.

  The average price of eggs — a frequent stand-in for inflation during the campaign — had declined from its peak in the spring and is back below last November’s prices. Average orange juice prices are up 29% and ground beef prices are up nearly 14% from where the two were a year ago.

  So we’ll see how long that lasts.

  Green tested out his $140,000 theory, by looking at national average data on key costs — and calculated $32,773 for childcare, $23,267 for housing, $14,717 for food, $14,828 for transportation, $10,567 for healthcare and $21,857 for what he said were other essentials. Add in federal, state and FICA taxes, and it gets to a gross income of $136,500.

  These costs can (and often are) mitigated through communal living and shared household capital. Just anecdotally, I can tell you that my mother-in-law has been pivotal in providing childcare for my toddler son. Daycare can cost north of $2000/mo. And if I don’t want to burn a vacation day staying home to care for him when he’s sick, I’m going out $200+/day for a nanny. But grandma can take over for the cost of lunch. And that’s for someone with kids. You don’t need childcare if you’re childless.

  Similarly, wrt transportation, I’m close enough to work that I can bike to work. If any coworkers lived nearby, we could carpool. Every household carrying its own car, maintenance, gas, insurance, etc is more a consequence of our atomized lifestyle than a requirement for survival. We absorb the cost as a luxury. And my home town of Houston builds our city to incentivize consumption of these luxuries.

  So I do question $140k as “poverty level” in a material sense. These aren’t survival costs, they’re overpriced amenities.

  Another point he makes is that the safety net does catch people at the very bottom, but traps anyone who climbs out. For instance, at $45,000, they lose Medicaid eligibility; at $65,000, childcare subsidies vanish.

  This has been historically described as the Welfare Trap or Benefits Cliff. Our policy of means testing public services results in certain cohorts being incentivized to downplay their income for the purpose of maximizing state benefits. This pushes people into cash-businesses, the gig economy, and other gray market channels for labor which are often unregulated or quasi-criminal in function. From there, you get a rising price of policing benefits as a share of their cost (leading to skyrocketing IRS audits of poor black residents concentrated in the Gulf Coast) on the one end and increasingly unreliable labor data used to calibrate optimal domestic labor policies on the other.

  What the article fails to address is the question “What happens to people operating below the poverty line?” The original Orshansky definition carries with it some real material consequences - malnutrition, exposure to the elements, significantly higher rates of treatable diseases. Do we see that for household residents below $140k/year relative to the $83k/year average? The article doesn’t say.

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  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    I can tell you that my mother-in-law has been pivotal in providing childcare for my toddler son. Daycare can cost north of $2000/mo. And if I don’t want to burn a vacation day staying home to care for him when he’s sick, I’m going out $200+/day for a nanny. But grandma can take over for the cost of lunch. And that’s for someone with kids. You don’t need childcare if you’re childless.

    This kind sounds like the $33k is about right then, it’s just that the value is provided by family (which is great don’t get me wrong). You can’t make these calculations on the assumption of these factors. What if you suddenly didn’t have free childcare? Would you be unable to then make rent?

    And what if your work moved somewhere where you had to then drive?

    How close are you to financial collapse if something bad happened?

    There should probably be a different number for a single person, but then there’s less sharing in other ways as well.

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    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨35⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      it’s just that the value is provided by family (which is great don’t get me wrong)

      The value provided by grandparents, plus the overhead of real estate and administration and profit. If you’ve ever actually talked with a daycare worker, you might be surprised to note that they can care for anywhere from four to twelve kids each. However, they aren’t seeing anything close to the $100/day each child yields in revenue. The primary cost of operating a daycare is typically the cost of the location - either explicit rents by the building owner or interest on debt borrowed to purchase the property.

      And what if your work moved somewhere where you had to then drive?

      What’s kinda ironic about Houston is that we’ve got these big commercial bus services positioned all through the suburban neighborhoods. I live to close in to take advantage of any of them. One of my bigger regrets in living where I do is that I didn’t get to take advantage of the two rail lines the city operates. We’ve been promised bus rapid transit or rail extension for over a decade, but it has never materialized. The bike trail is actually the closest thing to urban transit I’ve seen built since I moved in back in 2014.

      How close are you to financial collapse if something bad happened?

      Really depends on how it manifests. O&G has historically been pretty recession proof. But there are exceptions. The 80s boom years were terrible for Houston, because they rode in on the back of cheap energy. The Enron Scandal of '01 hit smack into the center of downtown. And the COVID shock gave us -$43/bbl gasoline, which sent local businesses into a free fall.

      There should probably be a different number for a single person, but then there’s less sharing in other ways as well.

      Living with roommates / a spouse brings down cost of living in a whole host of ways, no doubt. Just on its face, you only need one kitchen per household and kitchens can get very expensive.

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  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    What happens to people operating below the poverty line?

    There are probably parallels. Personally, I see some hazardously skip healthcare to avoid the cost.

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  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    So he’s estimating 140k for married with children? Whats the individual estimate?

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• finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  I personally consider the poverty line to be when you can live safely and comfortably, which for most places around the world would be like $20,000 and for intercity New York would be like $80,000.

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  • lemmyseikai@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    For how many people?

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    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      Individual

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  • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    The 140k amount was for a family of four and including childcare for two children.

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• frosty99c@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And so now, let’s tug on that loose thread… I’m sure many of my left-leaning readers will say, “This is obvious, we have been talking about it for YEARS!” Yes, many of you have; but you were using language of emotion (“Pay a living wage!”) rather than showing the math.

    I gotta say, anyone who critiques leftism by claiming the leftists don’t show the math hasn’t ever actually read Marx. Nevermind Piketty or Graeber.

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    • PP_BOY_@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Tbh Vanilla Marx is a pretty far cry from modern American leftist. “Pay a living wage” is itself about as anti-Marxist a statement one can make

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• henfredemars@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Fantastic read! Thank you for sharing.

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