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The Poverty Line is Fake! (w/ Sam Reich)
🕑 Added 2022-06-01 23:00:03 +0000 UTCthe poverty line is fake! In 2022, in the United States, the poverty threshold for a single person under 65 was an annual income of $13,590, or $1,132 a month. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the United States is $1,697 a month.
So a person on the poverty line can’t afford a single month of rent, not to mention food, healthcare, childcare, transportation, clothing, internet, a cell phone, or literally anything else.
And of course you can say, well yeah there are government programs designed to provide those for people below the poverty threshold..
The actual number of Americans who cannot afford the basic needs I listed, which is the actual definition of poverty, is 43% of households or about 142 million Americans. So 100 million Americans, one third of the entire country, cannot afford basic needs, and most don’t have access to them through government programs because they don't fall below this fake poverty line.
And the poverty line is fake because it was developed in the 1960s based exclusively on food prices, and not rent at a time when food prices were high and rent was dirt cheap. Today, food is dirt cheap and rent prices are astronomical.
Why doesn’t congress reformulate the poverty line? Because if they, it’ll look like poverty skyrocketed while they were in office, and that might make them look bad, and obviously looking bad is obviously much more important when you’re a bad person…
