That's not true. A comfortable lifestyle perhaps, but "basic" can be had on just a single average salary.
The median personal income in 2019 was $35,805 (cf. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). I think you'd be hard pressed to live on that with a family of 3+ people.
And what about the 50% of people who have a personal income less than the median?
edit: that stat was for 2019, not 2020, my bad
Biggest costs of life are housing, food and transportation. With one person staying at home, both the cost of transpo and food go down (because: one less person commuting to job, everything can be home cooked and the person staying at home have time to shop smartly and save a lot thanks to it).
This lives housing costs. Here, it's all about location. In many areas (assuming renting), you can have a house or apartment suitable for a family of three for less than $1000 a month.
Before taxes. That's in the area of 2400/mo after taxes [1]. My family of 3 pays around 600/mo for health insurance after employer subsidies, so call it 1800/mo. So after rent now you're living (with an infant!) on 800 a month. That's brutal.
My newborn burns nearly that much just on formula, diapers, and life-critical medicine.
[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/paycheck-calculator#nNffey40fm
ACA has subsidies for lower income households
I have no clue how the math works on average in terms of 35k jobs offering a subsidy at all, vs the marketplace subsidy. But even at a 50% subsidy it’s still not much money to raise a family on.
3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month for insurance.
If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.
The parent described the median-income earner.
In my state of Arizona, if you were grossing 36,000 a year with a family of 3 you would be about 20% over the threshold to qualify for medicaid.
Gross. More like $2200 after tax.
Healthcare for a family of 4 averaged to $1777/month in 2020[1]. The higher up the income ladder, the more the employer pays that. On the low-end, the employer doesn't pick up much of that tab. So that's the largest expense… unless it's sacrificed in order to maintain a roof, food and transportation.
And we're assuming zero contributions towards retirement, here.
So... no, it is NOT easy to live on that amount of money anywhere where there are opportunities to grow one's job/career.
[1] In 2020, annual premiums for health coverage for a family of four averaged $21,342, but employers picked up 73% of that cost. - https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-health-insurance-...