The Poverty Line Isn’t a Feeling — Why $140K Isn’t Poverty

Summary: Wall Street strategist Michael Green reignited debate by suggesting the federal poverty line should be high enough to cover households earning as much as $140,000. After critics exposed errors in his math and geographic framing, Green shifted the argument to a broader claim: many middle-class families feel financially squeezed, so poverty measures must be updated. That move conflates subjective financial stress with objective deprivation and risks poor policy responses.

What Green argued and why critics pushed back

Michael Green originally used a very high cost-of-living example to argue for a dramatically higher poverty threshold. Critics pointed out two basic defects: the arithmetic was flawed, and the analysis relied on one of the most expensive metro areas in the country as though it were typical. Green has since acknowledged those technical errors, but he now says the point was never the exact dollar figure — it was that many middle-class households feel economically stretched.

Feeling poor is not the same as being poor

There is a real difference between subjective feelings of financial strain and objective measures of material deprivation. The federal poverty line is a policy and statistical tool tied to concrete indicators of need; it is not designed to capture every instance of financial anxiety or tradeoffs that come with family decisions.

For example, objective signs of poverty include overcrowded housing: roughly 14 percent of American children live in situations with more than one person per room. That kind of material hardship looks very different from a household whose principal asset is a house with substantial, but illiquid, equity.

Housing wealth and the myth of being "trapped"

Green emphasizes homeowners whose property values have surged, arguing they are effectively trapped because a replacement home would cost the same. That ignores common and viable options: selling and buying a smaller or lower-cost home, relocating to lower-cost regions, or otherwise downsizing. Those options involve tradeoffs — smaller space, longer commutes, different local amenities — but they are real, and acknowledging tradeoffs is central to sound policy debates.

Flawed metrics and missing factors

A cornerstone of Green's broader argument is the Cost of Thriving Index from Oren Cass, which claims the median male worker would need the equivalent of over 62 weeks of pay to meet typical household needs. That figure has been criticized for omitting taxes and family-oriented supports delivered through the tax code and other programs. When those elements are included, analyses show the indexed cost of living for many family configurations has not risen as dramatically as the index implies.

Another major omission in some of the analysis Green cites is the growing role of women in the labor force. Including women's earnings in household measures reduces the apparent gap in purchasing power that comes from looking only at single male earners.

Child care: a legitimate problem with supply-side fixes

Child care is expensive and is an important driver of household costs, especially in high-cost metros. But that does not justify redefining poverty to include high-earning households. Three points matter here: (1) having children involves inevitable tradeoffs for many families; (2) analyses that focus only on the most expensive early years overstate lifetime burdens; and (3) there are concrete supply-side policy options that would reduce costs, such as easing zoning to allow more child-care centers and removing unnecessary licensing barriers that limit providers.

Expanding subsidies broadly to higher-income families would increase demand for constrained services, likely raising prices and exacerbating shortages rather than solving them.

Policy implications and political risks

Conflating subjective financial stress with objective poverty risks poor policy choices: expensive, inflationary subsidies that mostly benefit relatively well-off households while diverting resources from those in genuine need. A more constructive approach focuses on targeted supports for the truly needy and supply-side reforms that expand access to affordable child care and housing.

Bottom line: The poverty line should remain an objective tool for identifying need. Feeling financially squeezed is real, but the right response is targeted policy reform and supply-side solutions, not a wholesale redefinition of poverty that would redistribute taxpayer resources to families who are not materially deprived.