The broad trends in union membership, financial insecurity, and income and wealth distribution hinted at in the article are, to my knowledge, broadly true in the US, and also true when broken down by geographic distribution (rural vs urban).
Anecdotally—I grew up in rural America, and people would talk about the nearby (50k person) city like "the big city." I would say there was very little awareness of urban folks how rural residents nearby lived, and similar ignorance in the reverse.
The core of the argument OP is making is that you can have a more comfortable lifestyle in a rural area on a lower income.
You're right that rural costs of living are lower. Unfortunately I don't see any good data adjusting for this.
Nonetheless, the idea that rural America is doing just fine is sort of silly, for a few reasons:
- It's a minority of the population. So from a policy perspective, it's unclear to me what the conclusion should be. That more people should move to rural areas? That the Atlantic article is missing the experience of 1/5th of the population? ;)
- The same macro trends (rising GINI, declining real household wealth) exist across rural/suburban/urban divisions. (Note too that the Simpsons is probably set in a suburban, not rural, area—and suburban areas have experienced a sharp increase in poverty.)
- Qualitatively, rural poverty is associated with prescription drug abuse (extremely prevalent where I grew up), limited education and labor flexibility, limited geographic flexibility, etc.
So I never know what to make of these "it's going fine in Rural America" arguments.
It has a significant impact on rates: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
California's, for example, goes from 12-ish percent (average) to 18-ish percent (below only DC).
You know, the federal poverty level for a single individual is under $13K per year. In which low income / low cost area do you think that's not a problem?
The problem is the flattening of urban and rural within state like others have said. A suburb of NYC may as well be a foreign country compared to a suburb of Buffalo.
Of course if you're gonna doll out aid based on the absolute number you should set a sane threshold but that doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion.
If anything, yes, I agree the thresholds should be set much higher than they are now, and should be dependent on local CoL, but $13K/year is going to be a problem no matter where you live.
The closer the rate is set to the real definition of poor (however you define that) is the less adjustment you need to do to know how many people are "actually" poor, you just multiply by the population of the area that has that rate.
But like I said, the problem is you can't use one federal number and apply it across areas (be those areas states or subsections of states) with very different economic conditions without adjustment. Trying to do so is like trying to compare salaries across countries without taking into account exchange rates.
With the single federal rate you can do some rough comparisons. For example we can compare Ohio, a fairly blue collar, not totally rural but also not urban dominated state, with Massachusetts, a state that has all its stats dominated by the Boston area in order to tease out the difference between what it's like living in middle America. But even than it's kind of limiting because the next obvious question is what are the county poverty rates and that gets real messy and inaccurate real fast.
Think of the federal poverty rate like U3 unemployment, better than nothing but not good for much if you really want to understand what's going on
I hope that answers your question! Personally, I found the report from the Census Bureau and BLS (as per my earlier comment) quite educational for exactly this sort of eminently reasonable concern. But your mileage may vary!
Do let me know if you have any trouble with the Census Bureau SPM report, I'm happy to do my best to help you read it.
To put it another way, I think the question that you're getting stuck on is too simple to be very helpful and that better information might help you formulate better questions. I hope this makes sense to you, but I know my communications skills are quite far from perfect.
And these things vary, sometimes greatly, based on where you live.
Barnstable County (where the Kennedys live and the Kochs have (had?) summer houses) for a long time (might still be) middle of the road, poor-ish (~35k median income 2010 census, current national average is 56k) on paper because the really rich claim primary residence elsewhere and the wealthy people who do claim residence are retired (retired engineering managers and whanot, these people aren't Murdoch rich) are mostly savvy enough to look poor on paper so they can get discounted services from the state and pass more of it on to their kids. Who does that leave? Well there's no white collar industry to speak of so it leaves the trademen who fix the plumbing in the Kennedy compound, the service industry and a few business owners. So the county winds up looking dirt poor on paper despite the fact that there's a ton of money sloshing around (and it shows when you look at how the tradesmen and small business owners live).
This is an extreme example but you can see how more minor differences when applied across an entire county or state could pollute a comparison when you're trying to compare very precise things, like how well off a median plumber in Reno is vs the median plumber in Chicago.
With that in mind, the answer seems to be that in twenty-five states the straightforward calculation based on income exaggerates real poverty. You'll find aggregate numbers, and methodological details, at the link above.
I hope that answers your question.
The idea that there were parts of the US where you could buy a house for $60k was just as foreign as the idea of someone making $25k per year. They simply had no frame of reference for what wages and cost of living look like in places that weren't big cities.