00:00 Speaker A
Mike, before we dive into this, I want to walk you through how you got the $140,000 number here because you’re looking at different inputs, right? Expensive for the household. So you use national data to calculate average child care, housing costs, then you add in food, health care, taxes, transportation. These are all high numbers, and then you add the other essentials and that’s how you’ve accumulated $136,500 specifically. now,
00:33 Speaker A
As you well know, there’s been a lot of argument around this number since you came out with this estimate, Mike, but I wonder what your take on the debate it’s generated and what you kind of took away from it all.
00:54 Speaker B
Well, Julie, first of all, thank you. That’s a fantastic graphic, by the way. I think I’m going to steal it for any future editions. Um, yes, there’s been an extraordinary amount of debate around it. I think a lot of this has been a function of liberal reading where people are effectively trying to claim absolute rather than relative levels of poverty.
01:17 Speaker B
Um, the whole point for me was not to actually dig in and define a new poverty line. It was to understand what the average American family was experiencing. I constructed those numbers from the MIT living wage components. The real surprises are things like childcare, and as people have rightly noted, childcare is not something every family or every household has to do. So I focused very specifically on the experience of young families in America, trying to answer that
01:45 Speaker B
Q. Why aren’t we seeing more household formation? Millennials are now at the point where they should be at peak fertility levels so why aren’t we seeing more babies being born? Um, the answer is very simple. It is very expensive to have a baby in the United States today. And child care is one that should jump out at people, especially when you’re thinking about components like New York City elections, etc.
02:14 Speaker B
I think that what scares both sides of the debate, the left is so afraid that it officially distracts attention from the poor, who are genuinely, you know, suffering from real deprivation and real insecurity. And on the right, there’s just an incredible fear of opening up the idea of more progressive taxation and the idea that there might be institutional requirements, for example, around childcare that Mondami has proposed government-run healthcare.
02:44 Speaker B
To the right, I am afraid and others are afraid that this may be the proposed solution, right? For example, the new government bureaucracy of childcare. And so on all fronts, we got massive pushback from the institutional or official sector. Really, the incredible thing was I got 10,000 messages and an incredible number of comments on press vehicles where people basically said, Oh my God, someone actually understands my life.
03:12 Speaker A
Well, and that’s the very interesting thing about it because I think there are political implications of this, there are economic implications of this, but we keep talking and for the last few years we’ve been talking about the so-called vibsession. I was talking to a strategist this week about vibe pressure, the implication that it’s getting worse and the gap between what the numbers say and how people feel. And depending on who’s in the office,
03:40 Speaker A
They tell people, well, you’re not really feeling it. And so I guess what it did was kind of help validate what some people are feeling. Like we don’t make it up.
03:52 Speaker A
Even if we’re not poor, quote-unquote, even if we’re not actively struggling to put food on the table, we know, it’s not an easy environment.
04:03 Speaker B
Yes, I think that’s right. And I think it’s really important for people to understand that a large portion of the American population, especially those who we’re relying on to create future workers and future voters and future taxpayers, are saying, um, it’s actually impossibly difficult and it’s not a function of them being weak and incompetent. The simple reality is in a world where to rent or buy a home,
04:34 Speaker B
You need a second income. Childcare becomes a very real component of this. Historically, that may have been provided by neighbors or family members. But often, the jobs that allow people to afford these opportunities are far from those support networks. And so this has become an increasing reality for young families in the United States and it’s just impossible.
