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Is $140,000 the New Poverty Line for Americans?
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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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.
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.
Which is nuts, because a two bedroom (hope your kids are the same gender) place is gonna be 24k of that. So 8k left over for insurance (car, life, home, and medical) food, childcare, all other bills, taxes, Christmas, school supplies, children's clothes and shoes. It's way below the number that would cover half of that.
I truly feel for the people that are in that boat..