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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)
the poverty line isn't about any of that.
it's a financial threshold. it has says nothing about what people spend the money on, or don't.
A financial threshold based on what?
They didn't just throw a dart at a wall full of post it notes with random numbers listed.
That's the whole question at the heart of the discussion here, how to define the poverty line. The original article suggests $140,000 for a family of 4 in a suburb of a major city.
That's not an unreasonable situation. The vast majority of Americans live in suburbs.
There's your problem. Supply, demand, and entitlement.
"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...
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
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?
...
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.
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't be alive. I don't know where you got that from.
I don't understand why you're mad at all here.
Who's telling you that $150k salary is shameful? Are you conflating poverty and shame?
The argument was that cities have more opportunities for cultural and social events. That's undeniably true because those scale directly with the amount of people. A town of 10,000 simply doesn't have the bodies to support a metal scene a punk scene a hip-hop scene and EDM scene all at once. Thus, telling poor people that they must move away from cities is denying them those things. It's saying sorry, you're too poor to participate.
Many people live what seems normal to them but by outside perspectives would be seen as impoverished. No running water. No indoor plumbing. Child labor. Women denied rights. "It was normal to us" is an extremely weak argument.
No, i'm telling you there are many well-off people who think anyone who isn't as rich as them should not exist and view anyone the top 5% of incomes as subhuman scum.
those are the people that go to the cultural events, and they don't want disgusting poor people near them.
ok, you should go down to a poor area and start lecturing those people how they should live their lives. see how they respond.
There are rich people who think the poor should be exterminated, but they're (hopefully) a minority and not likely the people in this thread.
I really don't think those ultra rich snobs are the people going to see a local band play to 75 people in a bar. "Cultural events" doesn't exclusively mean like Opera and Broadway. It's also "three people put out an EP and are playing it live at Stingy Pete's tonight. Tickets are PWYW, $5 recommended"
No one here is lecturing the poor about how to live their lives. The argument was that poor people should be allowed to live in cities, if they desire, in part because there are many nice things that come with living in a city.
poor people never could live in cities. because they have the stuff rich people want, and they push out the poor people.
and the people who live in impoverished neighborhoods in urban areas, also don't have access to any of that.
because those things all require lots of money. where i live opera tickets are cheaper than going to see a local band in a bar. but both are going to be a minimum spend of 50-80 dollars.
Many poor people live in cities.
People who live in poorer parts of New York City, at least, can take a bus or train to other parts.
I don't know where you live but one of the popular bars near me in NYC is $18 for a show tonight. They also have a free DJ show of some sort. A smaller spot that does shows I know of has one for $14. That's just two spots I know off hand. There are many more.
I feel like you're messaging me from some other world. I'm mostly speaking from living in NYC. Where you you speaking from?
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.
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
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!
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