I’ve been meaning to write about this interesting essay by Michael Green, about how the poverty line could be pegged at $140,000 per year, if we’re talking about what he calls “the cost of participation” in contemporary American life.

Some of the claims in the essay are hyperbolic, and it was largely derided by the green eyeshade battalions of the dismal science, but it nevertheless struck a nerve for good reasons. For example:

Critics will immediately argue that I’m cherry-picking expensive cities. They will say $136,500 is a number for San Francisco or Manhattan, not “Real America.”

So let’s look at “Real America.”

The model above allocates $23,267 per year for housing. That breaks down to $1,938 per month. This is the number that serious economists use to tell you that you’re doing fine.

In my last piece, Are You An American?, I analyzed a modest “starter home” which turned out to be in Caldwell, New Jersey—the kind of place a Teamster could afford in 1955. I went to Zillow to see what it costs to live in that same town if you don’t have a down payment and are forced to rent.

There are exactly seven 2-bedroom+ units available in the entire town. The cheapest one rents for $2,715 per month.

That’s a $777 monthly gap between the model and reality. That’s $9,300 a year in post-tax money. To cover that gap, you need to earn an additional $12,000 to $13,000 in gross salary.

So when I say the real poverty line is $140,000, I’m being conservative. I’m using optimistic, national-average housing assumptions. If we plug in the actual cost of living in the zip codes where the jobs are—where rent is $2,700, not $1,900—the threshold pushes past $160,000.

The market isn’t just expensive; it’s broken. Seven units available in a town of thousands? That isn’t a market. That’s a shortage masquerading as an auction.

And that $2,715 rent check buys you zero equity. In the 1950s, the monthly housing cost was a forced savings account that built generational wealth. Today, it’s a subscription fee for a roof. You are paying a premium to stand still.

Green emphasizes that for couples with young children, childcare costs are a devastating addition to household budget. For many people in their 20s and 30s, this means “choosing” to be childless, because it feels fundamentally unaffordable. This of course helps explain why the birth rate has been cratering for decades — it’s now quite literally half of what it was when I was born at the peak of the baby boom. And the birth rate in the US is still a lot higher than in much of the developed world, The worst situation, not surprisingly, is in countries that still have strongly patriarchal traditional cultures, i.e., women are expected to do all childcare and other domestic labor, but where women also now have a certain degree of economic and social freedom. In places like South Korea, the consequence of that combination is a total fertility rate of less than one — a completely unprecedented situation in all of recorded history, and no doubt in the entire history of the species, or otherwise we wouldn’t be here to blog about it.

The Times had a piece today (gift link) that used Green’s essay as a jumping off point. The basic economic problems here are well known: the cost of housing, of childcare, of health care, and of higher education. These things are all central to any concept of a middle class lifestyle. Of course another big factor in all this are changing standards of what’s considered an acceptable version of such a lifestyle:

Mr. Thurston, from Philadelphia, said he wanted children. But right now, he and his partner must climb three floors to their rental apartment. Their car is a two-door “death trap.”

His salary, about $90,000, would need to cover student loans and child care. He also wants to live in a good school district and pay for extras, like music lessons and sports leagues.

“I know you don’t need those things,” he said, “but as a parent, my job is to set my child up for success.”

Even for those who own a home, the thought of children can be daunting. Stephen Vincent, 30, and his partner, Brittany Robenault, a lab technician, first went to community college to save money. Then, he said, they “ate beans and rice” for several years to save for a down payment.

Now an analyst for a chemical company with a household income of about $150,000, he likes his lifestyle in Hamburg, Pa., and wants to keep it.

“We live in the richest country in the history of human civilization, so why can’t I eat out twice a week and have kids?” he said.

To the skeptics who say these trade-offs are simply lifestyle choices, there was a rejoinder: Hey, you try it.

“It’s very easy from a place of wealth and privilege to say, ‘You should be happy with something more modest,’” Mr. Thurston said.

But, he said, “it would kind of suck to live that way.”

Alicia Wrigley is grappling with the trade-offs. Ms. Wrigley and her husband, Richard Gailey, both musicians and teachers, own a two-bedroom bungalow in Salt Lake City and feel lucky to have it — they say they could not afford it now. But juggling in-home music lessons with their 2-year-old’s needs can feel like a squeeze. They want another child, but wonder how it would all work.

“I know it’s possible,” she said, looking through the window at her next-door neighbor’s house, which is exactly the same size.

That neighbor raised six children there in the 1970s. One way mothers then would cope, Ms. Wrigley said, was to “turn their kids out all day, and they’d just run around the neighborhood.”

She said she would not do that today, not least because someone might report her.

“The world,” she said, “is fundamentally different now.”

This is reminds me obliquely of a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s study of life in a mining town in northern England in the mid-1930s. Orwell is interviewing a family of eight living in a four-room house (I would guess this would probably be in the neighborhood of 800 square feet or so), and he asks them when they became aware of the housing crisis. “When we were told of it,” is the reply.

. . . commenter Felix D’s question about this passage led me to look it up, and it’s somewhat different than I recalled, but the gist is the same:

Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortage first
became acute in his district; he answered, 'When we were told about it',
meaning that till recently people's standards were so low that they took
almost any degree of overcrowding for granted. He added that when he was
a child his family had slept eleven in a room and thought nothing of it,
and that later, when he was grown-up, he and his wife had lived in one
of the old-style back to back houses in which you not only had to walk a
couple of hundred yards to the lavatory but often had to wait in a queue
when you got there, the lavatory being shared by thirty-six people. And
when his wife was sick with the illness that killed her, she still had
to make that two hundred yards' journey to the lavatory. This, he said,
was the kind of thing people would put up with 'till they were told
about it'.

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[Not needing to drive shouldn’t be a luxury.]

Nearly all Americans drive, but it’s by necessity, not necessarily by choice.

Today, cars are an inescapable fact of life in most of the country. Almost 70% of U.S. workers drove alone to work in 2022, compared to 2.9% who biked or walked and 3.1% who took public transportation.

This reality doesn’t necessarily reflect Americans’ preferences, however. Many people in the U.S. want to live in walkable areas, but only a small fraction of the nation’s developed land fits this description. Around 90% of all housing in the nation’s largest metro areas is located in car-centric suburbs. The low supply of real estate in walkable neighborhoods drives prices upward, making it unaffordable for most people.

Culdesac Tempe is a 17-acre car-free residential development that could be a model for walkable neighborhoods in America.

Link: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/11/this-car-free-neighborhood-was-designed-to-revolutionize-american-cities/

Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post fired longtime columnist Karen Attiah over the weekend. Per Attiah:

 The Post accused my measured Bluesky posts of being “unacceptable”, “gross misconduct” and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues — charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false. They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.

Here’s the only reference Attiah made to St. Charlie of the Internet:

Here again we see the right wing definition of defamation in full force, which consists of quoting a person word for word without further comment.

Attiah did have some comments regarding white on white violence, but it’s long past time that we overcome the, if I may coin a phrase, “political correctness” that makes it impossible to discuss the pathologies of the white community without getting cancelled. Where are the fathers? Oh right: filling their houses with high-powered weapons, which they teach their soon to be completely mentally unbalanced by the most toxic swamps of the internet sons to use from a tender age.

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Dropping some political science on Brett Kavanaugh [free link]:

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh says good judges are like good referees.

“Am I calling it the same way for labor and management, for the business and the environmental interests, for the Republican and the Democrat?” he asked at a judicial conference over the summer. “If you can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘I would do the exact same thing if the parties were flipped,’ then you’re not being a good judge, just like you wouldn’t be a good referee if you were favoring one team over the other.”

A look at the court’s record in emergency rulings does not appear to reflect Justice Kavanaugh’s goal.

This is apparent in the overall numbers, with the Trump administration prevailing much more often than its predecessor had — 84 percent of the time, compared with 53 percent for the Biden administration. That is perhaps unsurprising, given that the court is dominated by six Republican appointees.

Drilling down to individual justices’ votes rounds out the group portrait.

In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48-percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump.

In all seriousness, however unsurprising this data will be to knowledgeable observers of the court who aren’t paid or pro bono liars, it’s still good to see stories like this when pieties about the nonpartisan legitimacy of the Supreme Court remain a staple of mainstream coverage. More widespread recognition of what the Court is does not solve the problem, but it’s a prerequisite for addressing it when it’s politically viable.

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Susan Collins sucks. And yet it does not look like Democrats have any plan to defeat her except relying on Janet Mills to run–who is a mere 77 years old, making her the perfect candidate for the Democratic Gerontocracy. A bit young perhaps. After all, she’s only 5 years older than Collins. And Mills may well not run. There are cases where this might make sense–Ohio with Sherrod Brown is an obvious example. No one could win in Ohio right now and Brown might not be able to either. But while Maine voters are obviously dupes for Collins’ bullshit, Democrats can quite clearly win a statewide race there. And yet the Democratic establishment hope is someone nearly the average age of death for American.

There is however a grassroots candidate, Graham Platner, who is a 40 year old veteran. I know nothing about him from a policy perspective, but boy goddamn howdy do Democrats need to take this to heart:

“We need to stop using the exact same playbook that keeps losing over and over and over again,” said Mr. Platner, a political unknown who serves as the local harbor master in the tiny town of Sullivan. “Running establishment candidates who are chosen or supported by the powers that be in D.C. — in Maine specifically — has been a total failure, certainly in attempts to unseat Susan Collins. It is time for us to try something new.”

I mean, if Mills ran, maybe that would be better, I don’t know, but a 77 year old is not exactly the clear message of change–a sentiment which has little to do with policy–that clearly defines the American electorate today. I’d vote for Platner based strictly on him not being 77 years old.

The post What are Maine Democrats Doing? appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Today, around 8,200 or so Americans will turn 21. Which means, of course, they will become eligible to engage in that time-honored habit of adulthood: drinking alcohol. (I’m sure absolutely none of them did so before they turned 21. I certainly did not, or at least, would not admit to doing so in this piece, which I know my parents read.)

Yet those who get the chance to legally order a beer or a wine or, God help them, a Long Island iced tea, may find the bar a little less crowded these days. According to a new survey released by Gallup this week, just 54 percent of Americans now say they drink alcohol. That’s the lowest share since Gallup began tracking the question way back in 1939, six years after Prohibition was repealed. 

Even Americans who do continue to drink say they are drinking less, and say they’re increasingly concerned about the health impacts of alcohol. A narrow majority of Americans say that even moderate drinking is unhealthy, while reported drinking frequency also hit record lows. (Only 24 percent reported having a drink over the past 24 hours, while 40 percent said it had been more than a week since their last glass.) And while you might be skeptical of self-reporting drinking habits — doctors certainly are — the most recent sales data says that per-capita ethanol consumption in the US has fallen from nearly 2.8 gallons in the early 1980s to around 2.5 in 2022.

Unless you happen to be in the booze business, this shift is 100-proof good news (with a few caveats). Drinking can lead to various social and medical ills, from the familial and financial devastation of alcoholism at the high end to increases in the risk of cancer and other diseases even at the lower end. 

But in a culture which seems to celebrate and encourage drinking, what’s up with more Americans putting down their glasses?

No safe level

Americans of a certain age — i.e., me — probably remember hearing that a glass of red wine a day could be good for you. Which, looking back, seems absurd. Ethanol in any form is a toxin. But thanks in part to what became known as the “French paradox” — the fact that the French showed low levels of heart disease despite their love of rich, fatty foods and glasses of Bordeaux — conventional wisdom settled on the idea that moderate drinking could actually benefit our overall health. 

If only. In the argot of Alcoholics Anonymous, medical science is having a “moment of clarity” around alcohol. It turns out that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health,” as the World Health Organization put it in 2023. One major meta-analysis that same year found that there are in fact no mortality benefits at low levels of alcohol consumption, and that risk for a number of health threats rises as consumption increases.

Those threats include numerous cancers, like breast, colorectal, liver, and esophageal. Even low-level drinking can lead to increased blood pressure, higher stroke risk, and disrupted sleep — which in turn can lead to a host of health problems over time. It’s no surprise that more and more countries — though not yet the US — are giving their citizens official guidance that no level of alcohol consumption can be recommended. 

The decline and fall of teen drinking

Whether or not American adults are actually listening to their doctors, the decline in alcohol consumption is real. What’s even more remarkable — and even better news — is the sharper decline in drinking among people who legally shouldn’t be doing it at all: the underage. 

In 2024, according to one long-running youth survey, 42 percent of 12th graders reported drinking alcohol, down significantly from 75 percent in 1997 (which happens to be the year I graduated high school, and no, I will not be commenting on which side of the survey I fell on). For 10th graders it was 26 percent (down from 65 percent) and for eighth graders it was 13 percent (down from 46 percent in 1997, which yikes). For those underage Americans who are drinking, the percentage who engage in binge drinking has also fallen in recent years, albeit less sharply. 

The benefits of reduced teen drinking are even clearer than they are with adults. About 4,000 Americans under the age of 21 every year die from excessive alcohol consumption, whether in car crashes, drownings, or suicides and homicides. Underage drinking is correlated with worse academic performance, risky behavior in general, and an increased chance of alcohol abuse disorder down the line.

Alcohol is really bad — with one caveat

Here’s one of the more unbelievable stats I’ve ever seen: scholars believe that something like 40 percent of all murders involve the use of alcohol. That’s just one example of the effects of dangerous levels of alcohol consumption. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates around 178,000 excess deaths each year from alcohol abuse, of which over 12,000 were deaths in drunk driving accidents — meaning one out of every three car crash deaths might not have happened without alcohol.

Less alcohol consumption means less of all of this. Fewer violent deaths in drunken homicides or car crashes, and fewer lives cut short over the long term because of alcohol-connected illness. It means fewer families torn apart by alcohol abuse, and fewer children who endure the long-term trauma of being the child of an alcoholic. 

If there’s any downside to this drop in drinking, it’s the possibility that the decline is being driven by a decline of socializing more generally. Americans are spending more time alone than ever before, and that comes with very serious health and social impacts of its own. We have, oh, several thousand years of evidence that alcohol consumption in moderate, responsible levels is pretty good for socializing, and right now, many of us need all the help we can get.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting everyone stop drinking — or start drinking just to make friends. I myself enjoy a drink, and for now I’m comfortable with the trade-off that comes with moderate drinking. But the benefits to the country overall of less drinking are impossible to dismiss. That’s worth raising a mocktail to.

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