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The median household income in the United States is roughly $83,000 a year. That number is supposed to mean a comfortable, stable, solidly middle-class life. A house with a white picket fence, a car, and maybe a family holiday. The kind of life the American dream was built on. But today, for a large and growing number of American families, that dream is gone. $83,000 a year feels tight. Tight enough that the car breaking down, the rent going up, or a medical bill in the mail can turn a stable month into a financial crisis. Now, here's the strange part. According to the US government, these households are doing fine. Better than fine, actually. They earn more than double the official poverty line for a family of
four, which sits at just over $31,000 a year. That number determines who qualifies for Medicaid, food assistance, housing support, and tax credits, and it shapes much of the national conversation around inequality and economic mobility. So, we're left with a contradiction. If $31,000 is the official government definition of poverty, but $83,000 feels tight for millions of families, then either household expectations have shifted dramatically or the benchmark no longer reflects economic reality. So, as always, we've got some important questions to answer. How can a family earning the median income in one of the wealthiest economies on Earth feel economically fragile? How exactly is the
poverty line calculated? And does that calculation still reflect what it actually costs to live? And finally, what are the real-world consequences of basing policy on past measures of economic well-being? The demand for your data has never been higher. But what many people don't know is that even your service providers can be unsafe. Over the last five years, there have been over 16 major data leaks from companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. That's where our sponsor Cape comes in. Cape is a premium cell service provider designed with privacy and security as its core principles. Founded in 2022 by experts in telecom and cybersecurity, Cape uses advanced technology to change your online
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taxes, and state income tax depending on where you live, take-home pay lands somewhere in the mid $60,000 range. That's the pool of money available. Everything has to come from that. Now, the biggest expense is housing. Nationally, the median homeowner with a mortgage spends a little over 21% of their income on housing, but in New York and California, homeowners are closer to 36% in Hawaii and Washington, D.C., around 35%, well above the 30% threshold economists use to define a household as cost-burdened. And for renters, it's even worse, with a median renter already spending about 31%, and roughly 12
million people spending more than half their income on rent alone. For a median-income family renting in a major city, annual housing costs can easily run 25 to $30,000. Let's call it 28,000. That takes a $65,000 take-home income down to $37,000 before anything else. Then you've got transportation. The United States was built around the car, which means employment almost always requires one, usually two. When you factor in fuel, insurance, maintenance, registration, and financing, another $10,000 are gone. So, after taxes, housing, and transportation, our original $83,000 is now down to 27. Next, we have to factor in health care. The average total premium for employer-sponsored family
coverage in 2025 runs nearly $27,000 a year. Employers cover for of it, but workers still contribute around $6,800 before they've seen a single doctor. And that's before any deductibles. So, now we're down to about $20,000 from our original $83,000. And then there's child care. Center-based care costs over $10,000 per child on average, and in some states they rival in-state college tuition. For a two-earner household with two kids, you're adding another 20 to 30,000 dollars on top of everything else. Even at a conservative $20,000, the budget goes negative here, and we haven't bought a single grocery, paid a utility bill, or put a dollar into savings. Now, the important thing to notice about the list of expenses
we just ran through is that almost none of it is optional. The car is required to get to work. The child care is required for both parents to earn the income that pays for everything else. These are what economists call fixed costs, contractual, recurring, and largely unavoidable. They're not luxuries you can cut when times get hard, but the baseline price of being a functional participant in the modern economy. So, if that's what life looks like on $83,000 a year, how does the government arrive at a poverty line of $31,000? To understand that gap, you have to go back to where the number came from. The US poverty threshold was created in the early 1960s by an economist at the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky. Her method was
straightforward. Government data at the time showed families of three or more spent roughly 1/3 of their income on food. She calculated the cost of a minimal nutritious food budget, the so-called economy food plan, and assumed that if families had to cut back, food and other expenses would shrink proportionally. So, she multiplied the cost of that food plan by three. That's it. Food times three. That became the poverty line in 1969. It was never meant to capture comfort or stability or middle-class security. Orshansky herself described it as measuring how much was too little, a floor below which families probably couldn't meet basic needs, not a definition of enough, a definition of not enough. And to be fair to Orshansky,
in the late 1960s, the logic actually held. If you could afford food at a minimum level, then the rest of the budget likely fit into the remaining 2/3. Housing was manageable. The median home price was roughly $20,200, just under three times income. Employer-provided health insurance was common and comparatively cheap. College tuition could be covered with a summer job, and child care wasn't yet a major market expense because single-earner households with one parent at home were far more common. But that world is gone. Today, food at home represents roughly 8% of average household spending, closer to 1/12 of the budget than 1/3. Meanwhile, housing has gone from a manageable expense to the dominant one. The median home now costs
closer to five times annual income nationally. In Los Angeles, it's over 11 times. In San Jose, over 12. And in San Francisco, around 10. Since the 1960s, home prices have increased at roughly 2.4 times the pace of general inflation. If housing had simply kept up with inflation, the median home today would cost about $177,000. Instead, it's closer to $431,000. Family health insurance premiums now approach $27,000 per year, and they've been rising faster than inflation, as well. And child care now rivals a mortgage in some cities, with costs rising about 153% since 2000, compared
with 90% overall inflation over the same period. So, if you apply Orshansky's logic to today's spending patterns and update the multiplier to reflect what food actually represents as a share of the modern budget, the implied poverty threshold for a family of four wouldn't be $31,000. It would be somewhere around $130,000. Now, that's not a proposal. It's a thought experiment. But it does illustrate just how dramatically the underlying structure of household costs has shifted, and how little the official benchmark has moved to reflect that. Now, there have been attempts to address this. The supplemental poverty measure, introduced in 2011, addresses some of the limitations of the official poverty
measure without supplanting it outright. It sets thresholds based on more recent spending patterns and accounts for tax credits and non-cash benefits, consistently identifying more Americans as living in poverty than the official measure. But, most eligibility thresholds for actual assistance programs still use the original 1960s framework. And the reason that hasn't changed is pretty straightforward. Currently, Medicaid alone covers nearly 70 million Americans and costs roughly $900 billion per year. Food assistance through SNAP reaches about 42 million people and costs another $100 billion annually. Because the poverty line acts as a gateway into much of the safety net, raising it would expand eligibility across healthcare,
food assistance, housing subsidies, childcare support, and tax credits all at once. The US government already spends $7.1 trillion a year, about a quarter of the entire economy. Expanding eligibility across programs tied to the poverty line would push that number significantly higher. So, the line largely stays where it is. And while it stays there, the gap between that number and the real cost of living keeps growing. But, here's where things get really troubling. Public assistance programs are built around income thresholds. Fall below the line and you qualify for Medicaid, food assistance, housing subsidies, childcare support, and tax credits. Rise above it and those benefits disappear. On paper, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it
creates what economists call the benefits cliff, which is one of the most quietly destructive features of the modern American welfare system. Here's how it works. Imagine a single parent with two children working full-time at $8 an hour, about $16,000 a year. At that income, the family qualifies for food assistance and subsidized childcare. The system is functioning as intended. Now, the parent gets a raise. Income rises to $25,000, about $12 an hour. Gross pay goes up, but it crosses an eligibility threshold and food assistance disappears, taking annual net resources down by roughly a third. That's the first cliff. At around
$31,000, $15 per hour, the parent is close to covering basic needs independently, but when the wage rises by just 50 cents an hour, eligibility for childcare assistance is gone. A small raise has triggered the of a subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually, sending net disposable income down by roughly 25% almost immediately. That's the second cliff. Continue up the wage ladder and it happens again. Around $22 per hour, public health coverage disappears. Now the parent absorbs private insurance premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs on top of everything else. At multiple points on the ladder, earning more means ending up with less. The person didn't do anything wrong, but the system just has a gap
between where help ends and where standing on your own two feet becomes possible. And the people living in those gaps are some of the most financially exposed households in the country. They earn too much to qualify for help, but too little to comfortably absorb market prices for housing, health care, and child care, and they don't show up in poverty statistics at all. They exist entirely in the space between the benchmark and reality. Those families aren't overspending on luxuries. They're spending all their income in participation costs, and we actually got a rare accidental glimpse of what happens when those costs disappear during the pandemic. When COVID hit, commuting stopped. Child care
centers closed. The daily transportation, lunches, fuel, dry cleaning, all gone. At the same time, the US personal savings rate surged to almost 32%, the highest level ever recorded. Stimulus checks played a role, yes, but just as important was what people suddenly weren't spending. For a few months, millions of households that had been stretched to the edge suddenly had the ability to absorb a surprise without it becoming a crisis, which is the thing that $83,000 a year is supposed to provide, but increasingly doesn't. It was the most vivid demonstration imaginable of how much of the modern household budget isn't discretionary spending, but the toll you pay just to show up. And then the economy reopened, and those costs came
back, many higher than before. Mortgage rates climbed from 2.88% in early 2021 to above 6.3% by early 2023, more than doubling the cost of financing a home that had itself surged in price during the pandemic. By 2025, home ownership was considered unaffordable in 17 states. Before the pandemic, that number was essentially one. And then insurance piled on. Property premiums rose more than 5% nationwide between 2023 and 2024. And for the roughly half of Americans who get health insurance through work, premiums in 2025 were about 26% higher than in 2020. So the squeeze resumed, and the gap between what the benchmark measures and what life actually costs widened a little further. And yet, if you zoom out and
look at national income data, the story seems positive. The share of US households earning above $150,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, has grown. The share in the middle has shrunk. On paper, that looks like progress. Fewer middle-income households, more high-income ones. But consider what $150,000 actually buys in a high-cost city today. After taxes, housing, transportation, healthcare, and childcare, a household at that income level is not affluent. It's stable, comfortable maybe, but not particularly far from the edge. With that in mind, the middle isn't shrinking because households are graduating into prosperity. It's just that affording a
stable life keeps getting more expensive. The official poverty benchmark says fewer people are struggling, but what's actually happening is that the definition of struggling hasn't kept up with real lived experience. And when that threshold keeps rising, households adjust. They delay home purchases, postpone having children, and overall take fewer risks. They don't start businesses because a single bad year could mean losing healthcare. They don't move for better opportunities because the rent in the cities where those opportunities exist is simply out of reach. Birth rates in the United States have fallen significantly over the past two decades, and financial insecurity is consistently one of the main reasons
people give. So yes, Americans are, by most measures, richer than ever. But if the cost of a stable life keeps rising faster than the benchmark used to measure it, the gap between what the numbers say and what people actually feel is only going to get wider. Now, housing sits right at the center of that story more than anything else. It's the single biggest participation cost, the one that's risen furthest from both the poverty line and the average wage. If you want to understand how it went from a need to a global investment asset, we made an entire video breaking that down.
You should be able to click on it on your screen now. And one more thing, if you've ever finished one of these videos and wanted to keep going, we've started a newsletter. Every week we pick one economic story, something too small for a full video, but too interesting to ignore, and write about it properly. The link to subscribe is below. Thanks for watching, mate. Bye.
