Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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