6 events in Passaic County with a date

How much does it cost to survive in U.S.?

By: Daniel de Vise
USA Today

..... A Wall Street portfolio manager has gone viral with a blog post that posits a large figure as a new poverty line for a family of four in America: $140,000 a year.
..... Set by the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal poverty level for a family of four is $32,150. The median household income in 2024 was $83,730.
..... The provocative Substack post, published November 23, [2025] comes from Michael Green, chief strategist and portfolio manager for Simplify Asset Management.
..... For a populist argument about middle-class America slipping into poverty, Green might seem an unlikely source.
..... "We have been told, implicitly, that a family earning $80,000 is doing fine - safety above poverty, solidly middle class, perhaps comfortable," Green writes.
..... But if you consider what a household actually spends on childcare, housing, health care and other essentials in 2025, Green writes, "that $80,00 family would be living in deep poverty."
..... Green set out to build a "basic needs" budget for a family of four with two jobs and two kids, based on average spending in 2024:
* Childcare: $32,773
* Housing: $23,367
* Food: $14.717
* Transpiration: $14,828
* Heath care: $10,567
* Other essentials : $21,857
..... Add about $18,500 in taxes, and you get a gross income close to $140,000. That's how much green contends a typical family of four needs to survive.

'Out of touch with reality'

..... Not surprisingly, many readers pushed back.
..... "Green's claim is wrong," wrote Noah Smith, another popular blogger who writes about economics. "not just slightly wrong or technically wrong, but just totally off-base and out of touch with reality."
..... "It is ... The Worst Poverty Analysis I Have Ever Seen," wrote Scott Winship, a senior fellow at the libertarian American Enterprise institute.
..... Detractors say it's partiality absurd to set the poverty line high above American's median household income.
..... Critics not data that suggest most Americans have enough food to eat, sufficient shelter, transportation and health insurance.
..... Writers picked apart Green's calculations.
..... Take childcare: His $30,000-plus figure assumes families are paying for center-based care, "which only a third of people with small kids actually use." Winship said in an interview with USA Today. People with older kids use it even less.
..... "Poverty: suggest you're going without: Without food, or health insurance or a working car.

'Holding on by your fingernails'

..... Green concedes a family of four with an $80,000 income might not be starving. That, he says, is not the point.
..... "What we experience in the United States is very rarely absolute poverty," he said in an interviewer with USA today. "What we're describing is precocity. That feeling of holding on by your fingernails."
..... A family of four with an $80,000 income might not starve, he said, but it would face deprivations. The family might forgo needed medical care, or subsist on cheap junk food. the parents might not have cash for decent childcare forcing one partner to quit a job, where upon the household income would plummet, and so on.
..... His Substack post mirrors efforts by think tanks and personal finance sites to quantify how much money a family requires to make ends meet.
..... The Economic Policy Institute offers a family budget calculator. It says a family of four would need about 4123,000 a year to attain "a modest yet adequate standard of living" in Essex County, New Jersey. In a prior blog post, Green examined living cost in Caldwell, a borough in that New Jersey county. Green's poverty-line exercise "basically is trying to replicate" the calculator, said Josh Bivens, chef economist at the left-leaning think tank. "But we're clear in this measure that it's not a measure of poverty or material deprivation - it's a measure of a modest but adequate standard of living."
..... Investopedia, a financial journalism site, uses similar calculations to estimate how much emergency savings a family should hod (about $35,000, on average) and the lifetime cost of fulfilling the American dream (roughly $5 million).
..... Green is "not wrong in the fact that the standards for setting the poverty lever are outdated and haven't taken into account the explosion of inflation across the ends that households face," said Caleb Silver, in chief of Investopedia.

Too low for modern America?

..... The federal poverty threshold, Winship writes, stems from a 1964 government report that set the line at $3,000 of families based on food prices and family budgets at the time. Poverty levels have been adjusted upwards for inflation.
..... Green is not alone in claiming the poverty line is too low.
..... "The poverty level does not accurately account for the actual needs of most households in America today, [12/27/2025] and it should be higher," Silver said.
..... Green says the precarious stat4e of America's middle class is emblematic of widening income disparities and the increasing concentration of American wealth.
..... As a solution, he suggests "reintroducing a progressive taxation," which means charging higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, and easing the burden on everyone else.
..... His focus on income inequality puts him in the company of the Economic Policy Institute and other progressive voices.
..... Yet, Green says he voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Trump's signature tax and spending bill eased the tax burden on the rich.
..... Green says much of the vitriol trained on his viral blog post came from "people who have a vested interest in the status quo," who shudder at talk of a six-figure poverty line and taxing the rich.
..... That's nonsense, some critics say.
..... "If the middle class is precarious today, [12/26/2025] it is less so than it has ever been in world history," Winship said.
..... Green promises solutions to the poverty problem, and proposals to save American's middle class, in future posts.
..... "There will always be a middle calls," he said. "North Korea has a middle class. The requisition is whether that middle class is thriving or not."

HOME