My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
yesigiveafig.com
My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#2Can anyone pass independent judgment on how accurate this is? (I mean, yes, he lays out all his sources and logic. I don't know enough to tell whether he's making an accurate assessment of the situation, or is trying to grind some particular axe.)
Because if this is true, it's massive. And it explains so much - starting with why everyone feels the economy is broken.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#3> “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I did not know that is how that is calculated. Sigh, that’s not a great way to do that.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#4Can anyone pass independent judgment on how accurate this is? (I mean, yes, he lays out all his sources and logic. I don't know enough to tell whether he's making an accurate assessment of the situation, or is trying to grind some particular axe.) Because if this is true, it's massive. And it explains so much - starting with why everyone feels the economy is broken.
My experience over a few decades and several home ownerships is that debt plays an outsized role. You are paying a bank first with your mortgage payment, and that csn be 80-90% of your housing cost, which is partially defrayed by a tax writeoff. And the banks basically have a license to print money. We are all working for the banks to some extent. Could this change in the future? You bet it could... but we have to make it happen.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#5Pretty sure this is AI written or at least assisted. “It’s not just X, it’s Y. And the foo? It bazzed.”
Honestly hard to disagree with what the message is but I can’t really take him intellectually seriously even with an obvious premise with such lazy writing
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#6Notable quotes:
> “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
> If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
> It becomes sixteen.
I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here, but broadly speaking, it seems extremely likely that the number is no longer "three", and thus the conclusion that the "poverty line" is broken seems quite likely.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#7I wish the author dispensed with the mea culpa.
It makes the essay hard to take seriously.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#8> “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” I did not know that is how that is calculated. Sigh, that’s not a great way to do that.
This was a minor plotline in one episode of The West Wing where they discussed a couple of the details the article gives about it, with the additional claim (which I'm unsure of the truth of) that it was influenced by the creator of it having grown up in the Soviet Union and therefore having incorrect assumptions about how much food prices would influence poverty in the long term. (I forget how it turned out, but I remember that the member of the administration hearing about this was at least initially against updating the poverty line calculation because it would cost them politically for the number of poor people to go up while they were in charge, to which the expert describing the new explanation replied that they already are poor, and the new calculation would just be recognizing that fact).
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#9Can anyone pass independent judgment on how accurate this is? (I mean, yes, he lays out all his sources and logic. I don't know enough to tell whether he's making an accurate assessment of the situation, or is trying to grind some particular axe.) Because if this is true, it's massive. And it explains so much - starting with why everyone feels the economy is broken.
[deleted]
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#10Can anyone pass independent judgment on how accurate this is? (I mean, yes, he lays out all his sources and logic. I don't know enough to tell whether he's making an accurate assessment of the situation, or is trying to grind some particular axe.) Because if this is true, it's massive. And it explains so much - starting with why everyone feels the economy is broken.
I think it’s mostly bullshit, and a misunderstanding of what poverty is.
Poverty doesn’t mean you can only afford bare minimum stuff and can’t take any vacations or buy luxuries. It means you are struggling.
People in poverty do not have childcare costs, or healthcare, or even housing and transportation (they could be homeless or live with relatives, and either take buses, walk, bike, or get some kind of free ride to work)
Food is truly the only thing people really need. For that, the original amount seems accurate.
Ridiculous to say $100k is the new poverty line. Get a grip.