This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.

With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.

The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.

“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation."