this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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You've missed the point and doubled down on missing it. The 3x metric was right in 1963, but 3x food is still the same metric used to calculate the poverty line. Food has increased by inflation sure, but as the author says, food doesn't account for 3x the household budget, instead of 33% it's more like 7 percent. So the poverty line is way off.
The author then goes on to highlight issues with getting from the current poverty line which is mitigated by government subsidies, to that actual poverty line where you need to put in significant extra effort while seeing no actual gains until you reach it.
I think you're misunderstanding my argument. We're not applying the inflation of food to the previous metric. We're applying the overall inflation of all costs. Which is way higher than the food inflation. And includes much (but not all) of the increase in housing/etc costs that people have to pay. I think there's probably a lot to dive into about why CPI isn't measuring the true cost of living increases, but this article fails to get to that discussion because it misunderstands the calculations.
Inflation is a single percentage based on the total cost of living so applying it to the old poverty line calculation results in a poverty line that is still based on 3x the cost of food.
Inflation is a single percentage based on total cost of living: I agree. But I don't agree at all that your second point follows from your first? Imagine the original calculation was based on the cost people spent on bell bottom pants each year. And that happened to be accurate at the time (and therefore ended up with an original number similar to the food calculation). If we adjusted that number for inflation, would you say that the new number was still based on the cost of bell bottoms (even though the number would be equal to the one "based on food"). And if so, how can you say that the same number was "based on food" and "based on bell bottoms" at the same time?