Food for thought :eyebrow:

[footfootfoot]

First, hi to everyone, My internet free lifestyle has been somewhat successful, but lately I've been needing to use it for job seeking. (Another thread for another time.)

Maybe this belongs in politics, it seems like a political issue, if Bernie Sanders is anyone to go by.

Doing some numbers crunching: figuring my monthly nut and trying to find how much I need to earn to make things work. I've already cut everything to the bone, e.g. My only expenses are mortgage (ins and tax escrowed) electricity, trash, water, oil heat, propane cooking, car ins, gasoline, food, health ins. No entertainment, meals out, internet, cable, new clothes, vacation, savings or RMR (repair, maintenance, reserve).

Being that I am at, or somewhat below, Federal Poverty Level (FPL=$20,090./yr) I am eligible for and avail myself of these federal programs:

Food stamps
HEAP (heating and energy assistance)
Medicaid

Wanting to get off the federal tit and raise my standard of living, I decided to calculate how much I'd need to earn to actually meet this standard of living and then to go above it.

My food stamp benefit is roughly $500 a month or $6,000/yr.

My HEAP benefit is about $1500 for the heating season, so $1500/yr.

Medicaid, in case you aren't aware is by far the best health insurance available today. $0-$5 copay for office visits, therapy, and other treatments, $0 copay for surgery, lab tests, MRI, X-ray, or hospital visits, $0, $1, $3 copay for prescription drugs. Vision and dental also covered, although you can only get the cheapest frames and lenses, no upgrading, but still, $0.

If you see a therapist regularly, or have a chronic medical condition requiring ongoing treatment, or frequent tests, or require an expensive medication regimen, all that can get expensive. $0 on Medicaid.

The closest plan to medicaid would be a Platinum plan and even then, you'd have copays and about $1500 out of pocket before your plan kicked in. Yearly cost of a Platinum plan in my state would run about $700/mo. or $8400/yr plus the $1500 out of pocket = $8900/yr

Adding all that up comes to $16,400 in legal benefits for a person with two kids who is earning at or less than 130% of the poverty level. (As your income goes higher, your benefits diminish slightly. My figures are based on my benefits at my income, such as it is.)

So I would need to make $36,490 a year to achieve a comparable standard of living, and that does not even include putting aside money for savings, buying a car or a house, or going shopping for clothes.

Federal minimum wage is now $7.25/hr or $15,080/yr. Where I live, minimum wage is $8/hr or $16640/yr. In either case, below FPL. Employers are letting the government (i.e. taxpayers) make up for the inadequate wages but for any small business they aren't in a position to do better. Big corporations are benefiting greatly from the federal aid programs and from the reluctance of people who are eligible for the programs to use them out of pride or fear of stigma, or maybe not even realizing that they are poor.

The upshot of all this is the disheartening realization that unless I can earn about $40,000 $45,000 a year, I'm better off in a minimum wage job. And even at 40-45k, it isn't very much money at all considering the cost of living, $67,246 for one adult with two kids, in my area. (According to the Living wage calculator: http://livingwage.mit.edu/ )

I wonder what the current income distribution looks like these days now that the middle class is finally gone.

Here's a chart from 2013, Pretty much a plateau there. For comparison, if $1000 was an inch, the 50th% would be about 6'-8" tall, the 1% would be 656' tall. The figures for 2015 are wider still.