"Green works on Wall Street as portfolio manager for a half-billion-dollar fund. Most of the readers of his Substack were fellow wealthy finance professionals before his post about the $140,000 poverty line went viral.
He said in an interview that he started calculating the cost of raising a family when thinking about the challenges faced by his three children, who are all working adults in their 20s, and their generational peers.
“This is unfortunately very much the lived experience for people who are trapped in that valley of death,” Green said, the term he applied for when people earn too much to qualify for benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, but too little in his view to afford necessities. He sees that “valley” as being inhabited by people earning between about $40,000 and $100,000, or even more in high-cost areas, he said.
“They are not making enough to really cover the cost of full participation in the economy. An increasing fraction of people are choosing not to get married,” he said. “We’re seeing household formation pushed later and later and later. … It’s telling you the cost of having a traditional [two-parent, two-child] family: That choice is being opted out.”
Green wrote that he “felt sick” when he recently learned how HHS calculates the poverty line: three times the cost of food for a family in 1963, adjusted for inflation every year.
“He is echoing some things that poverty scholars have talked about for quite a while — the official poverty measure being antiquated,” said Christopher Wimer, co-director of Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. “Food in budgets has become a much smaller piece. Housing has gotten much more expensive.”
An HHS spokesman did not respond to inquiries from The Washington Post. By the official measure, 10 percent of Americans were impoverished last year."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/29/poverty-line-green/