By Marc W. Polite
Good evening, my readers. I came across a recent post that caught my interest. It is in relation to our modern economy, and how poverty is defined in the United States. Wall Street analyst Michael Green in a recent Substack post crunched the numbers, pointing out that if revised for today’s American economy, the poverty line is actually $140,000 a year.
In a piece sub-titled “How A Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America”, Green notes that the old metric of poverty according to the federal government of $31,200 for a family of four was set in 1963. This 62 year old metric is not in line with what the cost of living is today. Due to rising costs of housing, health care, child care, and education, the figure is now 140k. Without stigmatizing anyone, this goes to show that lack in our society is not due to people not “working hard”, but the result of at least two generations of policy.
What has been encapsulated in political terms recently as the “affordability crisis” is the result of decades of wage stagnation. With the confluence of inflation, rising costs on the necessities of life, an increasing amount of people find themselves squeezed. Open, brutal measures that transfer wealth upward like the “Big Beautiful Bill” only make matters worse. What we all know for certain, with or without a study, is that wages have not kept pace with the cost of living. Despite all of the hoopla over the “record-breaking” Black Friday sales, we know that people aren’t shopping as much as they have in years past.
Given that mass scale reforms to this state of affairs are unlikely to come from elected officials, some propose that organized labor take the lead in fighting to remedy the chasm of pay disparities that have been decades in the making.
Author Gregory Butler and founder of The Workerist Manifesto in a recent post calls for a new National Industry Recovery Act.
Given how dire the situation is, any push towards change is better than suffering through what we all are collectively enduring now.