Wait, did you just say $30/hour is low?
The last time I did any serious freelance software work, five or six years ago, I started out charging $80/hr, and was still selling myself short.
[Edit - any time I see "daily rate" I think of contracting - £160 a working day as a salaried employee is probably on the low side, but nothing exceptional].
Maybe I'm just a terrible screwup, but in 2004 I qualified for EIC and left programming entirely because the bottom had fallen out of the Perl market. And I've never gotten benefits.
And no, $60K is pretty tight for a family of four anywhere in the US.
That's... not true. I came from a family of eight who never had more than $50k income (no health insurance), and I don't remember ever even having to think about it. We had multiple cars, a large-ish house, etc.
This was of course not in a city, but it's not the cheapest place in the states either. (After a bit more googling, I may have to retract that last statement. If it's not the cheapest place in the US, it's awfully close.)
Sure, back in the olden days growing up 20 miles from here on the farm, we didn't have squat, either. But seriously, my daughter's braces cost $5200. No joke. Maybe it's just that I can't survive on a diet of Marlboros and PBR any more, having seen something of the world, but $60K would simply not be enough.
(Five of us kids had braces, by the way; and five of us had glasses, and one had hearing aids. I know none of those things are cheap.)
...Anyway, I seem to have dragged you into a rather off-topic discussion. Sorry about that.
According to the table at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884238.html (which claims to be using census data; I tried digging through the census website for this information but actually finding it there is a pain) as of a few years ago 27% of households had 1 person. 33% of households had 2 people. You will note that adds up to 60% of the households. So the median household size is 2.
Households with at least 4 people (the ones that $60k is claimed to be tight for) make up, according to the same table, about 23% of households.
It would be interesting to look at the income distribution for such households, since _that_'s what would be relevant to the concern you're raising; I would expect their median household income to be somewhat faster than $52k, though possibly not a huge amount more. If you can figure out how to get this data from the census website, I'd be really interested.