This is part of why I went on an auto-didactic spiral on Economics. Which I hate, but which is very informative once you stop buying into economic punditry and look at NUMBERS. https://twitter.com/showupforthis/status/1343970078564311040

AKA: people still don't know that the federal poverty line is solely based on an :Emergency: :FOOD: budget, and was never meant to represent an ongoing state.

Most programs that use the poverty line as a metric for eligibility, also use multipliers that range from 100-400% of the guidelines because they do somewhat deal in reality but won't actually change the line for fear 9f having to spend political capital explaining to people that

no, they're not actually middle-class, they're poor, have been poor, and are getting poorer.

Me, I'm typically somewhere in the poor to broke range, but seeing at less than half of households have cash reserves to deal with a $400 emergency, we need to deal with facts and not feelings. You may not want to think of yourselves as poor but that doesn't mean you're not poor.

*also, maybe stop viewing being poor as any kind of metric of intelligence or value, like...stop judging people for not having money including yourself.