Is this guy actually trying to justify racism?
My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#12Can 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.
You could just Google it.
- There's https://www.census.gov/topics/income-poverty/poverty/about/h... which does say that the Official Poverty Measure is indeed based on food expenses multiplied by three.
- On the other hand, there's also https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/demo/pove... which says that there are now two measures: the Official Poverty Measure and the newer Supplemental Poverty Measure that's intended to address some of the problems of the former.
Mention of the Supplemental Poverty Measure doesn't seem to appear in the submitted post using a quick Ctrl-F. Draw your own conclusions.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#13Notable 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 i…
> I'm not sure how accurate the methodology is to come up with the specific budget that produces the number "sixteen" here
The share of goods in people expenses is something governments have been tracking extremely well since the end of the inter-wars period (losing some quality during WWII).
As far as economical measurements go, those are among the best you'll get on the real economy (monetary measurements tend to be more precise).
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#14Can 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…
I feel like the author addresses most of your points well with his comparison of a survival line vs a crisis line.
But re the "people in poverty don't have" a few caveats, in comparison to the 60s, "public" transportation is generally of lower availability and higher priced, single earner households were the norm, and housing was cheaper (addressed).
And while <$100k is pointed to as the line of dimished marginal benefits, in the context of the US median household income being $66k is an indictment of a broken system.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#15Can 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…
From TFA: "In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries."
He's not saying the average person who was homeless, or living with relatives in 1963 was spending roughly one-third of their income in groceries, it was explicitly families.
You've just No True Scotsmanned your way into redefining what is being discussed. Please read article and firmly secure yourself :)
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#16Pretty 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
Yes, everything after the intro seems to be AI-written. It is lazy and unpleasant to read, but beyond that there are some serious issues of inaccuracy and dishonesty that make this worse than other cases I've seen.
> I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”
I think this is quoting https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2025/..., where the real quote is "The poverty threshold was originally defined as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and is annually adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)." This isn't buried in a research paper, you paraphrased and then claimed it was a real quote by putting in within quotes, and you failed to cite a source. This is deliberately lying to your readers about the core premise of the whole piece.
The next sentence:
> I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.
That isn't even what your fake quote said.
> In her January 1965 article,
What article? You haven't mentioned this yet, and you still haven't cited a single source.
> ”if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”
This is minor, but again this is an inaccurate quote. The original (https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v28n1/v28n1p3.pdf) says "on an average", not "on average". Two out of two uncited quotes are wrong so far, making the whole piece untrustworthy if it wasn't already.
> “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” — Plutarch
I assumed this one was real but I searched anyway because of the pattern of fake quotes. The first result is an article titled "Fake Plutarch Quotes Are the Newest and Most Facile Ailment of All Arguments About Inequality". This is another fake quote, three for three now.
I'm not going to read the rest of this, even without the trustworthiness issues the bland AI filler is not worth spending any time on. Everyone, please do not do this. Whatever rough notes you were going to feed into the AI are much better, just publish that if you don't have the time or ability to make it "good writing", however you define that.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#17I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest:
> To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal (which is now digital-only)—you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. / The cost of that “Participation Ticket” for a family of four is not $58. It’s $200 a month.
We're talking about needs here, yes? If your kids are young enough to need childcare (a recurring theme of the article), they don't need their own phones, so we're talking about two adults.
You can easily get an MVNO plan for $20 a month with 10GB data, which is more than enough for needs. Tether to it if you absolutely must access something on a device other than a phone. Get two of them, one for each of the adults in the family.
There's $40, not $58 and definitely not $200.
It just made me wonder if it's this easy to save 80% on the author's expected cost in this category, why should I trust that the other "national averages" the author uses should be considered as the factors in how families struggling financially could meet their needs?
It reminds me of when people use the "average SNAP benefit" as an indication that people on SNAP are going hungry. It's called "supplemental" for a reason: people are expected to spend some of their other money on food--and people receiving the average SNAP benefit as opposed to the maximum SNAP benefit have been through an assessment that determined they should have other money available to spend on food.
I don't doubt the poverty line should be higher than it is, but jumping from 3x to 16x a minimum food budget is much too far a jump.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#18Pretty 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
Yes, everything after the intro seems to be AI-written. It is lazy and unpleasant to read, but beyond that there are some serious issues of inaccuracy and dishonesty that make this worse than other cases I've seen. > I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” I think this is quoting https://…
> The U.S. Census Bureau releases two poverty measures each September. The first, called the official poverty measure, is based on cash resources. The second, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). The official poverty measure has remained mostly unchanged since it was introduced in the mid-1960s. In contrast, the SPM was designed to improve as new data and methods become available.
– https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2025/...
I’m not sure how to treat this, but if the official poverty measure is used for practical purposes and not the SPM, the core premise is still entirely valid. I have no idea if that’s the case, and why the “official” one is still measured at all.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#19I think this was the section that made me question the accuracy of the rest: > To function in 1955 society—to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen—you needed a telephone line. That “Participation Ticket” cost $5 a month. / Adjusted for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. / But you cannot run a household in 2024 on a $58 landline. To function today—to factor authenticate your bank account, to answe…
The phone point was terrible but he’s not wrong that next to housing, childcare, and healthcare, basically all other expenses hardly matter at all for a family these days, including food.
If the core point about the poverty line being based on inflation adjusted food prices alone is correct, then the piece holds up very well and explains a hell of a lot about how life feels in the US right now.
[edit] if the “the line you see on charts is still just 3x food costs” thing isn’t actually true, through, then the article gets a lot weaker in a hurry.
[edit2] FWIW the Wikipedia page on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) largely confirms this, raises some similar points about potential problems with the “poverty line” today on basically the same grounds as the article, and reading it gives the same sense of standing on a deck of a ship that you’ve just noticed is leaning alarmingly toward starboard as the linked piece.
Re: My Life Is a Lie: How a Broken Benchmark Broke America
#20140k is significantly more money than I've ever made in my life.
Where I live, really the line where life becomes a real struggle is about 80k I would say. Below that, you're putting off maintenance, not saving money, the car is accumulating wear that you can't fix, and a medical bill is fatal.
People living way below 80k can only be doing so with significant government assistance.