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What is poverty to you?
The line has always been arbitrary.
when you can't pay for necessities. food, housing, clothing.
if you can afford these things. you aren't in poverty.
How much food, housing, and clothing?
If you have a family of 5 living in a 1 bedroom unit eating mac and cheese every night, they're technically housed and fed. Most people would say that's poverty though.
That's why I say the line has always been arbitrary.
depends on who you ask. depends on the size of the bedroom.
for a rich person, it would be a much higher threshold than for those who are poor. that's all about 'standards' of living.
i grew up on canned/frozen foods, and yeah ate a shitload of mac and cheese and other horrible foods. i hate plenty of calories, even if they were unhealthy. but it's what we could afford. i also only had cheap fall apart clothes. but i was never hungry, or cold. i didn't shared a bedroom, but many of my friends did. like a lot of poor people, we spent more on certain things like clothes because we could not afford nicer things that lasted longer. but where i lived... everyone was like that so it wasn't a big deal.
most of my peers where i live now, think i grew up in poverty, because they grew up much wealthier. i've been on first dates where the person lecture me how my parents were irresponsible to have me if they could not afford to pay for my college or buy me a new car at 16, etc. i usually laugh at their absurdly high standards, but to them it is a 'bare minimum' and anyone who doesn't have those things shouldn't exist.
for a family of 5 living in a 1 bedroom eating shitty food, any minor improvement would feel like a huge success. but waht rich people don't get about poor people is they tend to appreciate that they aren't homeless and starving, and don't really have a concept of nicer/healthier food because it doesn't exist in their social peer group. i never ate healthy food until i got to college because it was the first time in my life it was ever available to me. nobody in my rural working-class down ate that stuff, just like we didn't go to live performances, own luxury cars, or a ton of other stuff.
None of that changes the fact that poverty is still an arbitrary line.
I also never went hungry or cold, but had the power turned off at the house probably a half dozen times growing up because the bill got too far behind. Pretty sure my mother went hungry a few times to make sure we ate, but she always hid it. I shared a room with a sibling until I moved out. I'd argue I did grow up in poverty.
That being said, I have travelled through China, and pooped through a hole in the bottom of a moving train where people lived in a shack next to the train line with no running water or electricity at all. Those people also live in poverty, far worse than what I experienced.
So as a developed country, why can't we set the poverty line at a level where we WANT people to be? The line itself is just a tool to help us better set policies to reduce the number of people on one side of the line. Set it too high and it's difficult to move people across it, but set it too low and you're not helping a large number of people who aren't in a situation that is reasonable. There isn't any reason why we can't feed and house everyone with running water and electricity in this country, even with healthy food. So that should definitely be required. I'd argue, like the original article though, that other things should also be included. Like kids having access to a decent education, youth and adult participation in physical activities like sports, and the transportation required to get around (be that public transit in cities, or a personal vehicle in more rural locations)
the poverty line isn't about any of that.
it's a financial threshold. it has says nothing about what people spend the money on, or don't.
A financial threshold based on what?
They didn't just throw a dart at a wall full of post it notes with random numbers listed.
That's the whole question at the heart of the discussion here, how to define the poverty line. The original article suggests $140,000 for a family of 4 in a suburb of a major city.
That's not an unreasonable situation. The vast majority of Americans live in suburbs.