Last month, a Wall Street portfolio manager named Michael Green created a bit of a stir with a Substack article headlined, “How a broken benchmark quietly broke America.” His provocative economic argument, in a nutshell, amounts to the obliteration of an often cited but too-rarely dissected metric: the federal poverty line.
Green writes: “While trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP (gross domestic product) growth and low unemployment, 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 felt sick.”
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