Business
Commentary: Is $140,000 really a poverty income? Clearly not, but the viral debate underscores the ‘affordability’ issue
On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a wealth manager named Michael Green published a Substack post arguing that a $140,000 income is the new poverty level for a family of four in America, where the official poverty line is $32,150.
The post promptly went viral.
One would hope that economic commentators coast-to-coast mentioned Green as their “person I’m most thankful for” at their family gatherings that week, because he gave them something to masticate ever since. On the spectrum from left to right, countless pundits have rerun Green’s numbers to deride or validate his argument.
It is jarring that in one of the richest countries in the world, one-third of the middle class does not make enough to afford basic necessities.
— Stephens and Perry, Brookings
“The whole thing doesn’t pass the smell test,” asserted right-of-center economist Noah Smith in a very lengthy rebuttal. On the other side, Tom Levenson, who teaches science writing at MIT, gave us a Bluesky thread in which he noted that “$140,000 in many urban areas in the US is a family income that is at least precarious, and at worst, one or two missed paychecks from having to make rent-or-food choice.”
Green has asserted that the response to his post has been “massively favorable.” That isn’t my impression, but leave it aside.
Here’s my quick take: Green made a category error (and a rhetorical blunder) by hanging his argument on the concept of “poverty”; that’s the claim that most of his critics focus on. His real argument, however, concerns the concept of affordability. Indeed, in a follow-up post he redefined his argument as applying to “the hidden precarity for many American families.”
We can stipulate that making $140,000 a poverty standard is absurd. Even in a high-cost economy such as California’s, millions of families live comfortable lives on much less. (The median household income in Los Angeles County — meaning half of all households earn less and half earn more — is about $86,500.)
Plenty of working families are raising children and having fruitful social lives on median incomes or even less: Living thriftily is not the same as living penuriously or meanly. Much of what middle-class families give up are things that aren’t necessarily crucial. Green’s image of families stripped to the bones with mid-six-figure or even high five-figure incomes feels like something conjured up by an asset manager with a distinctly affluent clientele, which is what he is.
Yet, what his post alludes to implicitly is that the concept of “middle-class” has evolved over the last few decades, and not in a good direction. That’s why so many Americans, including millions with incomes that used to place them firmly in the middle class, feel strapped as never before, wondering how they can afford things their parents took for granted, such as putting the kids through college and saving for a comfortable retirement.
“The nation’s affordability crisis has not spared middle-class families, one-third of which struggle to afford basic necessities such as food, housing, and child care,” Hannah Stephens and Andre M. Perry of the Brookings Institution observed last week. Their analysis covered 160 U.S. metro areas, and held firm in all of them.
(They defined the middle class as falling into the income range of $30,000 to $153,000.)
Let’s give Green’s argument the once-over.
He started with the origin of the federal poverty calculation, which dates back to 1963, when a Social Security economist named Mollie Orshansky figured that since American households spent an average of one-third of their budget on food, if you estimated the cost of a minimally adequate food basket and multiplied by three, you might have a useful overall standard for poverty. She pegged that at $3,130 for a nonfarm family of four.
“If it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’” she wrote, “it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on an average, is too little.” She pegged that at $3,130 for a nonfarm family of four.
Green festooned his post with lots of hand-waving and magic asterisks to accommodate changes in American lifestyles over the ensuing six decades and come up with his $140,000 standard. But if one applies a constant inflation rate to Olshansky’s $3,130 via the consumer price index, you get about $33,440. As it happens, the government’s official poverty level for a family of four today is $32,150. Pretty close.
That’s an important figure, because it defines eligibility for a host of government programs. Eligibility for Medcaid under the Affordable Care Act (in states that accepted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion) runs up to income of 138% of the poverty level; higher than that steers families into ACA health plans. As KFF notes, “in states that have not adopted Medicaid expansion, adults with income as low as 100% FPL can qualify for Marketplace plans.”
Green’s critics generally note that the median household income in the U.S. was $83,730 in 2024, meaning that he’s placed well more than half of America into the poverty zone. That just swears at reality.
It needs to be said that Green’s approach differs from those articles that regularly appear asking us to commiserate with families earning $400,000 or $500,000 because they can’t make ends meet.
As I’ve reported in the past, these articles invariably depend on sleight-of-hand. They offer their own definitions of “rich” and list as necessary or unavoidable expenses many items that ordinary families would consider luxuries — lavish vacations, charitable donations (including to the adults’ alma maters), etc., etc. The strapped family eking out an existence on $500,000 featured in one such piece had fully-funded retirement and college plans, payments on two luxury cars, “date nights” every other week … you get the drift.
Levenson ran the numbers for a hypothetical family in his home town of Brookline, Mass., which is objectively upper-crust, but his approach applies more widely. Let’s run them for a hypothetical household in Los Angeles County. These figures are necessarily conjectural, because your mileage may vary — in fact, everyone’s mileage varies.
The median monthly rent in L.A., according to Zillow, is $2,750, or $33,000 a year. On the other hand, the median home price in the county is close to $1 million. At today’s average mortgage rate of 6.2% and assuming a 20% down payment, the cost of an $800,000 mortgage runs to $4,900 a month, or $58,800 a year. One can find a cheaper home farther from the coast, so for argument’s sake let’s posit a $500,000 home with a $40,000 mortgage: $2,450 a month, or only $29,400. But you’re probably living farther from work, so your transportation costs go up.
The property tax on that $1-million home: $10,000 in year one. (On the $500,000 home, it’s $5,000.)
State and federal taxes on a $140,000 income: about $18,000. Social Security payroll tax: $8,680.
So of our $140,000, housing and taxes leave us with somewhere between $44,500 and $78,920.
Food: The bureau of economic analysis pegs the annual spending of a four-member California family at an average $18,000. That figure is almost certainly on the upswing.
Healthcare? In its annual report on employer-sponsored health coverage, KFF found that the employee share of family covered reached $6,850 this year, with employers shouldering the balance of the average $27,000 total. For families on Affordable Care Act plans, the costs are impossible to calculate just now, because Republicans in Congress can’t get their act together to extend the premium subsidies that make these plans workable.
Then there’s child care. In the old days, when single-earner families were more common than today, that wasn’t as much of an issue than it is today. But if both parents work, children have to be stowed in child care until they’re old enough for kindergarten or first grade — let’s say up to age 5 or 6. In California, according to one survey, that’s about $13,000 per year per child.
A few more things we haven’t counted yet: cellphone account, say $100 a month; home Wi-Fi, another $100; computers, $1,000 or so each; cars, $17,000 to $25,000 used; auto and home insurance, $1,500 each; gasoline; and utilities ($3,300 a year, according to SoFi).
At the low end of housing costs, our California family has remaining monthly discretionary income of a few hundred dollars. At the higher mortgage level they’re underwater. Levenson adds, “our notional couple best not have any student loans.”
It’s also worth noting that our couple has put a dime into retirement or college funding. If they set aside 10% of their income for 401(k) contributions, they’re in trouble.
What we’re actually looking at is the collapse of the American middle class. “It is jarring that in one of the richest countries in the world, one-third of the middle class does not make enough to afford basic necessities,” Stephens and Perry of Brookings write. “The single woman living in Pennsylvania buying her first home, the Latino or Hispanic couple in Indiana running a local business, the Black parents in Texas starting their family — all of these faces of the American middle class are struggling with affordability when they shouldn’t have to.”
Trump could alleviate these pressures, notably by knocking off the tariff stunts. For all that he declares “affordability” to be a Democratic hoax or that his acolytes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and White House chief economist Kevin Hassett try to smile away the reality, the American public isn’t fooled.
The Conference Board, a business think tank, reported that U.S. consumer confidence fell sharply in November. No surprise. Michel Green put his finger on something, and the likelihood is that things are only getting worse.
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.
The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.
Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.
Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.
Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.
In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.
The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.
The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.
The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.
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