If you’re interested in the topic, I recommend the MIT living wage research [1]. They’ve got probably the most useful calculator, letting you compare multiple scenarios.
They're using state level minimum wages, but that's just as inaccurate as using the federal minimum wage.
"Living wage" may include having enough margin to save such that one may retire at something resembling a typical retirement age. If so, it's very easy to under-cut it and still be apparently doing fine, until age 70 when you have to keep working, through illness and pain, as a Wal-Mart greeter.
This also means responsible savers have to compete with borrowing-against-their-future types with no retirement savings, for things like housing or (relatedly) various scarce benefits for their kids. IMO it's a pretty strong argument against "freer" personal retirement account systems being the main mechanism of retirement savings, and for mandatory, strong public pension schemes.
Doesn't seem to be.
>[The living wage model] does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g., provisions for retirement or home purchases).
https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide...
Must be childcare costs & housing making it so high, then. I gather childcare costs vary quite a bit from city to city, and in my cheaper location those are easily the two biggest expenses, with childcare eclipsing housing by a fair margin, for 1-parent and 2-parents-both-working categories on the calculator, with 3 kids.
FWIW only the "management" category's average income is (barely) above the "living wage" for a single-adult household, for three kids, here. Since that's pre-tax income, yeah, I'd say that's about right. Kids are crazy-expensive.
yeah if you check the hourly earning chart, the hourly wage required for a dual earner household with 2 adults and 3 kids is only $32.29/hr.
No single job that earns enough, I think is what you found; this doesn't preclude that dual-income families can afford to have three kids, with average or above-average income jobs.
I can imagine it would be very difficult to make ends meet in this situation as a single parent with 3 or more kids. (I suppose you would either need an exceptionally high paying job, or another major source of income besides that job.)
Right wingers are upset because "it's socialism" and folks on the left who I've discussed the idea with have repeatedly expressed fear that it will undermine feminism.