So Rich, So Poor

The result is that half the jobs in the country pay less than $34,000 a year and a quarter pay less than the poverty line for a family of four.

median wage job paid $14.97 an hour in 1973 (in 2010 dollars), but increased only to $16.01 an hour in 2010, an increase of 6.9 percent over thirty-seven years, or less than 0.2 percent annually.

million people who now live below that income level represent one in three Americans!

also don’t hear much about people with incomes below twice the poverty line, which is approximately $36,000 for a family of three (or $44,000 for a family of four). Many studies conclude that this amount is the real level that we might define as “adequate”

population) increased a staggering 390 percent.

The income of the top 0.1 percent (one one-thousandth of the pop

The income of the top 1 percent went up a staggering 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, while that of the bottom 20 percent grew just 18 percent in those twenty-eight years.19 (Income in the middle barely grew either.)

The top fifth took in 53 percent of all after-tax personal income in 2007.18

Even more serious is the ever-increasing number of people in extreme poverty—people living below half the poverty line, or below $9,500 for a family of three. An astonishing 20.6 million people lived in extreme poverty in 2011, up by nearly 8 million in just ten years, and 6 million had no income other than food stamps. At the same time, people who are not poor but nonetheless routinely struggle to stay afloat also need much more of our attention. The near-poor—those with incomes below twice the poverty line, or $46,000 for a family of four—brings the total of the poor and the near-poor to more than 106 million people, a number that is nearly as arresting as the utterly shocking number who are in extreme poverty.

e. Experts estimate that the right multiplier of the basic diet today would be more than seven, not the three that Orshansky used (which probably was too low from the beginning).