The economy, they tell me, is great. Stocks are at an all-time high. GDP growth is up.

Jobs are tight, but almost all new jobs are going to American-born workers. Real weekly wages are

up, even adjusting for inflation, and inflation is slowing down. Materially, we have never

been better off. We have supercomputers in our pockets,

air conditioning in our homes, antibiotics, modern dentistry. So why do so many Americans still feel

poor? When it comes to the economy, feelings don't seem to care about facts.

Michael W. Green, a Wall Street portfolio manager I first heard of three days ago,

just gave us a viral explanation of why this is the case.

The key, he says, is a metric most of us take on good faith, the poverty line.

In 2025, the U.S. Census gave us 32,150 as the poverty line for a household of four in the lower 48 states.

Green says, not so fast.

It should be closer to 140,000.

That's right, a family making $140,000 a year is poor. At face value,

this sounds suspicious. The 24 median income for a family with two or more children was $109,000.

Are you telling me $140,000 makes me poor?

Cue the hysteria and the suck-it-up buttercup reactions.

Green was instantly ridiculed.

It's completely disconnected from reality, said economist Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute.

It's laughable to put a poverty line

far above the median income in the United States. Noah Smith wrote, the whole thing doesn't

pass the smell test. So I did some digging. And sure, Green's numbers don't all stand up to scrutiny.

Maybe child care costs $25.7,000 a year and not $32,000 a year.

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