“The $140,000 Question” by Zvi

Description

There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. The condensed version was entitled ‘The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty,’ and a follow-up here.

His actual claim in that post, which was what caught fire, was that the poverty line should be $140,000, and even that this number is him ‘being conservative.’

Obviously that is not remotely true, given that:

America is the richest large country in history by a wide margin.
$140,000 is at or above median household income.
You can observe trivially that a majority of Americans are not in poverty.

Today's post covers this narrow question as background, including Green's response.

If you’ve already had your fill of that, including ‘well, yes, obviously, how are we bothering with all this, I know it went viral but someone was being Wrong On The Internet’ then you are not wrong. You can safely skip this post. It's fine.

I’m writing this as a lead-in to broader future discussions of the underlying questions: