Frankly. I don’t think I internalized the source material enough to provide a fair take on the source and concede the author likely conflates the issue poorly.

Thank so much for the intellectual bout. Appreciate you.

Sure. But the issue is the sample size is naturally large so the Central Limit Theorem applies.

As such, the population of the US as a whole is likely normally distributed. Thus the outliers are normalized and this should not skew anything.

140k/4 is about 35k a person. Since a household of 4 assume 2 kids and kids consume a median of 30k a year not including housing you are limiting each adult to about 40k a year pre tax. Tax is going to consume about 50k so that’s 30k for 2 adults for the year. Housing costs at 1800 a month for a 2 bedroom eat up about another 20k.

This leaves 10k for food, clothes, etc.

Assuming I didn’t jack up my math (bad assumption even if I teach finance as a living), there is simply not enough money to really enjoy life. At 80k you are living on a 60k deficit, which means you rely heavily on the good grace of others to function.

Unless I am mistaken poverty lines are usually for families not individuals.

I think 140k median us wide for a family seems reasonable. Sure it’s pretty high for some Low Cost of Living areas, but many of those areas lack local social services, public transit, etc.

For how many people?