I’m genuinely bothered by this “$140k national poverty line” thing. The biggest ticket item in @profplum99’s simple arithmetic of survival is $32,773 childcare. If you are paying that much for childcare, it’s not really a case of poverty as much as socioeconomic policy failure esp labor policy in dense urban centers. What this article spells out isn’t really a poverty or even inflation problem but a textbook case of the “Baumol disease”: the labor intensive low productivity services sectors like childcare, education, and healthcare go up sharply in costs even as the real prices manufactured goods and mass produced food fall sharply! Yes, the “participation ticket” to middle class life (raising kids, staying healthy, getting to work) is now dominated by stagnant-sector services whose relative costs have skyrocketed. But two young adults and two kids getting by on $140k total income isn’t “poverty”. In all likelihood, on $140k you’d have air-conditioning, smartphones, decent cars, medical insurance through work, and access to decent cheap clothes, appliances, and furniture. Ofc this is really a basic needs budget for two young adults and two babies. Now what about two older adults and two college entering kids? Or two adults living in rough neighborhoods and bad public schools and wanting better private school education for their two school age kids? OTOH, if you are DINK (double income no kids), which indeed increasingly many are, you are even modestly comfortable and able to afford some vacation and regular eating out. That’s not “poverty” by any typical definition. So the core problem that Mike Green spelled out in his now viral article really isn’t “poverty” but a case of socioeconomic imbalance as productivity stagnant services comprise an ever larger share of modern life and we lack the institutions to service it. That’s what led to the demand for undocumented immigration and cheap labor, which in turn became the biggest rallying cry for populism backlash. People want cheaper labor intensive services, but don’t want cheaper labor. So we must be willing to accept 1) more socialized less efficient solutions; 2) using less of such services; 3) paying more for such services by consuming less elsewhere. Regardless, redefining the national poverty line and providing typical poverty assistance would be exactly the wrong and futile way to address it as it fundamentally misdiagnoses the core problem. I don’t mean to by any means dismiss the importance of the issue. Clearly it resonated widely for a reason: it’s a genuine problem! But the correct diagnosis is a first step towards a real cure!