Reality is as many as 80% if not more of the US population is straight out poor.
https://x.com/snarwani/status/2001276371360735658
“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
The formula was developed in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, when she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items, e.g. housing, if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line.
This is WILD. The US govt hasn't updated the parameters to determine the country's poverty line in over 60 years.
Reality is as many as 80% if not more of the US population is straight out poor.
Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent.
If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
It becomes sixteen.
Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200.
*It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000.*
posted by Satish Sharma at
07:53
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