- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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Rent is like 50% of my income currently and I’m trapped because nowhere charges less for the same space and I don’t qualify for rentals without a guarantor that I no longer have. At this age, my parents were in their 3rd house on a single income with 3 kids.
The wealthy really fucked us over, hey. They’re scum for what they did.
They’re scum for what they are currently still doing, and must be stopped.
1000%. Preach it!
They are also scum for what they are doing.
The wealthy do what the wealthy do, voters in their millions enable them.
Up to now you have believed in the existence of tyrants. Well, you were mistaken. There are only slaves. Where none obeys, none commands. – Anselme Bellagarrigue
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 highly recommend that you read the actual substack article.
The claim is based around how the original poverty line was the cost of food multiplied by 3. This assumes that food is 33% of your spending and that your other expenses are approximately the other 67%.
The $140k value is based around the fact that the ratio has shifted immensely. Food is cheap in the US relative to the other goods/services required to live in society. If you take the new ratio and extrapolate it out, the multiplier is over 10x the cost of food to account for the other components of spending.
Even if you want to debate the actual number itself. The poverty line is laughable and anyone living at it is legitimately destitute, not just in “casual poverty”
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.
Take how much it takes for a living wage in the most expensive part of the country.
And that’s it. If you try to shrink wrap it down to where it’s bare subsistence anywhere, you trap people in places where everyone with the means leaves. Sure, the cost of living is low, but there’s no jobs because everyone with money left. So it becomes impossible to get by, let alone amass the funds needed to relocate.
I guess it depends what you plan to use the number for. If you plan to set the min wage on it, you will destroy small businesses in poorer areas, and probably cause the chains to leave those same areas.
This is already happening, but it’s better to keep paying the poor less under all circumstances as far as republicans and centrist democrats are concerned.
Can’t create a permanent subclass of flyover morlocks if you pay them like the blue state eloi.
No jobs will mean no people eventually. That will solve poverty.
Same plan for make America healthy again. Kill off the ones who can’t afford to be healthy.
ISTG there are more commenters up in here who obviously didn’t read the article than ones who did.
Like always, how far your money goes depends on multiple factors. 140k in the Midwest alone means you’re living comfortably. Like all bills paid off, a lot of extra money for leisure, etc.
If you have a family and live in the bay area, then it’s not that much. I personally wouldn’t put it at poverty, but it’d be somewhat close to being paycheck to paycheck (assuming you still need to pay mortgage and whatnot)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is highly dependant on where you live, as has been said before.
If $140,000 is the poverty line can I please make poverty wages?
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.
No obviously not.
This calculation is for a family of four. Please read more than the headline and comments.
Well shit thats a little Less than 3x what I make lol. 💀💀💀💀
No.
uh huh, thank you vice and mr wallstreet substack poster for spreading such awareness, but where does that leave people in actual poverty?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
The substack is well worth the read.
Math that a lot of us educated poverty-livers have done before. Its refreshing to see one of the econ-bros validate it.
“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.
“My plastic surgeon said smiling is a waste of Botox, but I can’t help but let out a boisterous ha cha fucking cha at the absurdity. If poor people don’t want to spend so much money on cost of living they should just go live in the places nobody lives because there are no jobs or resources.”
“Poor people are just so bad at managing money. That’s why they have to blindly trust everything we say. We know how to spend money wisely, and we know what’s best for the economy and them.”
“Get out of the way Plebs! We’re betting it all on AI!”
“Oh my! Well, that was unfortunate but also completely unforeseeable. I guess the only thing left to do is brush ourselves off, pat ourselves on the back for being such altruistic utilitarians, ignore the screams from the plebs and go again.”
“So where’s our bailout? Time is money.”
“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.
Which method does the U.S. use to calculate its poverty line?
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.”
Adjusted for inflation using an inflation statistic that does not factor in changes to the price of medical care, housing, or energy.
Adjusted for not real adjusted inflation. But like including a gameboy so it feels legitimate.
And what’s not talked about is that food prices have been kept low this entire time via government while the cost of everything else has skyrocketed.
