Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:

> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.

We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.

You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.

There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.

It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?

It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.

I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.

It seems the author fed a list of documents and points to an AI, asked it to write an argument on it, then the AI hallucinated quotes and tried to badly extrapolate from real data. I think the original point might be true, but it is hard to trust tbh.

I think you're just picking at a detail that doesn't alter the picture much. I think we can all agree that having home Internet and a smart phone matter. Cheap phones cost a few hundred, cheap plans cost $40+/person if you use normal amounts of data, not < 5 gigs, home Internet costs $50+, and renting or buying modem type stuff. Amortizing all that might be under $200, but it's probably damn close (or at least circa $140) depending on a lot of details. Particularly if you crack a screen or something every few years.

Yeah the author makes a classic mistake of over arguing the point (potentially because the article was AI generated).

Laser focusing on housing and childcare would have been enough to make the point. Throw healthcare in and it's a solid argument. Get into the weeds on individual expenses and you open yourself up to a lot of nitpicking, which is all over this comment thread

He also way overshoots the target. I absolutely believe the current poverty line is way to low, but trying to argue it should be $140,000 a year is insanity. A lot of people will disregard the overall point of the article just due to that claim alone.

I mean it's worth noting that it seems to be for a family of four. I do feel pretty confident that if you take the poverty line as being a measure of the income below which a household has major systemic risks, saying that it probably should have been something like $80k in 2020, and that if you adjust it, then concluding it being $100k+ doesn't shock me.

It's not rocket science to see that just $2k/mo on housing and $2k/mo for healthcare for four people adds up to $48k, and that means more than $60k pre-tax income is an insufficient total compensation.

Cheap phones like a year old Moto G are under $100. There's no reason that shouldn't last two years. They do everything necessary. If you're near poverty, you don't get to use "normal" amounts of data, streaming shows and Spotify and YouTube. You need enough data to get by, and 5GB will easily load every website you must access in a month, never mind that the plan includes all the talk/text you need.

I really do pay $15 a month for my phone plan. I've never hit my 5GB data cap.

I do have $30 home internet. So even if we assume two adults and home broadband, we're talking $70 including hardware, not $200, but there's nothing I do on my home WiFi that I absolutely need and couldn't do from my phone while staying under the data cap. But I'm not financially struggling, and it's an expense I'm happy to pay. It's not something I need.

I also use cheap Mint Mobile plan with a 5 gig plan. Most months I don't hit the cap. But the months that I do all have two things in common: either traveling, often with the implicit assumption that I can use my phone for work, or tethering to use for work when there's a power or internet outage. Those primary causes aside, the current online universe does an awful lot of video and I've wasted an awful lot of data watching tutorial videos and how-to type stuff.

That said, the point is that if you can't watch a tutorial because it'd run over your data cap, it's problematic. So is having too trash of a phone - it's the kind of thing employers will see as a negative signal at a certain point.

Which is to say, sure, maybe you can spend under $200/mo on phones and Internet for one or two people, but realistically you're not spending under $100 without major and problematic sacrifices. And whether it's a $100 or $200, compared to housing, food, other stuff, it's not a wild expense.

The phone point was terrible but he’s not wrong that next to housing, childcare, and healthcare, basically all other expenses hardly matter at all for a family these days, including food.

If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.

[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.

[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.

I think it's more just an example of the flawed methodology. Like, it assumes a 4-person household, right? Two adults, two kids. If the kids need full-time childcare, it's because the parents must both be working full-time, right? Otherwise presumably one or the other of them could take care of the children at least some of the time. But where can you pay two adults for full-time work and only hit $31,200? Is there anywhere that actually pays a $7.50 minimum wage? Even in states where that's technically the minimum by law, you can't hire somebody for that. I live in one such state. KFC advertises $17 an hour on the sign outside.

And the kids must be young enough that they're not in school, if the childcare figures are to be plausible. $32,773 for two kids? I'm not remotely in a low cost of living area, but you're not paying that kind of rate even for twin newborns. It's less than half that for after school care.

The problem is that it's taking average figures as though people who are financially struggling are paying average costs for things. That's never been the case. People who don't have money have always had to be careful about how they spend it.

It's a decent point that "3x food costs" is likely too low a benchmark. But it doesn't come close to justifying 16x.

What's your estimate for hardware costs? You can't get phone+service for $20/month. What if they have limited or poor credit?

You can get a year old Moto G for under $100. There's no reason it shouldn't last two years (or 25 months for easy math, $4 a month). And you can get an MVNO plan for $15 a month that covers all talk and text and 5GB data. $19.

Those are the actual costs of my phone plan. I've never once come close to the cap because I don't stream music/video on my phone. It's not a need. I can load all the websites I must access and look up maps everywhere I need to go. And it's a pre-paid plan. No credit check required.

People who are really struggling simply do not NEED to spend more than $20 for phone service.

I think you’re underestimating the age you can leave kids to fend for themselves while you’re at work.

I don't think I am. Twelve? You don't need your own phone, never mind a smartphone with accompanying data plan, before you're 12.

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