Can you be on a six-figure income and still be considered poor? | Arwa Mahdawi

A viral essay has caused outrage in the US with its argument that the poverty line for a family of four is now $136,500. But is this so wrong?

Have you heard that a family of four in the US is now considered poor if their household income is under $136,500 (103,300) a year? Don't @ me about the maths - I'm just the messenger. The person behind this calculation is Michael Green, who is chief strategist and portfolio manager for Simplify Asset Management. I think this means that he makes large sums of money by fiddling with even larger sums of money. When not doing that, Green writes a newsletter and recently published a viral piece on Substack arguing that the poverty line, calculated as $31,200 by the Department of Health and Human Services, is a broken benchmark". These days a family with a low six-figure income is officially the new poor", he reasoned.

Green's essay has sparked numerous rebuttals, with people arguing that he had turned the poverty measure into a middle-class measure. It's completely disconnected from reality," the economist Kevin Corinth said, for example, noting that the $136,500 figure was higher than the US median household income of $83,730. It's laughable to put a poverty line far above the median income in the United States."