Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[aedens]

Pay is $170,000 per year.
The Work is real and committed 20 hours per week only.
The position is available full Time.
One can do the work and it is based on results.
No one can but those few who want to.
The other work is Licensed.
The root issue and fact is this.
If you make over $46,000 per year you are the Planetary Global One Percent.
They will not agree since facts are irrelevant to Leftist who refuse to work.
The work is real they are not. Rule Four applies. Stupid refuses to fathom what they actually are.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful potential of stupid people.
Second place first loser.
Talk to a Farmer or a trucker right now.
As you know I also build Soil since 2019.
We will replant this Spring for we understood His Cycle.

For someone at 55 holding $1.2 million in a traditional 401(k) and expecting a 24% marginal rate in retirement,
building a separate Roth layer now creates meaningful optionality.
Withdrawals can be structured to stay below the thresholds that trigger Medicare premium surcharges,
and taxable income in any given year becomes a planning lever rather than a fixed ceiling.

Rule Five:
All human beings are included in four fundamental categories: the naive, the intelligent, the evil and the stupid […] The intelligent person knows that he’s intelligent. The evil one is aware to be evil. The naive is painfully imbued with the sense of his own candor. Unlike all these characters, the stupid doesn’t know to be stupid. This contributes to give greater strength, incidence and effectiveness to his devastating action. The stupid is not inhibited by self-consciousness”, wrote Cipolla

 Mises’s contract‑theory language, quantity fixes the size of the exchange, while quality fixes the content and conditions of that exchange. Both must be clearly defined for a contract to be enforceable and for the parties to assess whether performance has been satisfied.

Propaganda works they are not Democrats. You will be erased and have and will continue to do so.

[Higgenbotham]

Why $140,000 Is The New 'Poor'
Andrei Jikh
721,114 views Dec 15, 2025

The question is, what does
0:45
it mean to be poor in America? In the
0:48
1960s, the government asked Molly
0:51
Arshonsky to go and find out the answer
0:54
to that question. What is poverty? which
0:57
if you think about is really hard to
0:59
define because one person's definition
1:01
might be really different than someone
1:03
else's. But here's how the government
1:05
defined it. They started by assuming a
1:07
couple of things. Number one, they
1:09
assumed it was a family of four.
1:12
Secondly, that food was the biggest and
1:15
most predictable part of their budget
1:17
and that if you knew the bare minimum
1:19
cost of feeding that family, you could
1:22
just sort of work backwards to estimate
1:24
everything else. because food was
1:27
consistently the biggest part of a
1:29
family's budget back in the 1960s. But
1:32
fast forward to today and we spend
1:35
proportionally way less money on food
1:38
and way way more on everything else like
1:41
housing and health care and child care,
1:44
transportation, insurance, debt, taxes
1:46
and all those other things. And those
1:48
categories did not get factored in to
1:52
the original formula. And what that has
1:55
done is it has created the illusion that
1:58
poverty has barely grown. But Michael
2:01
Green says if we apply the same original
2:05
method and the same logic except we use
2:09
the share of income Americans spend on
2:11
essentials today, we would not get a
2:14
poverty line of $31,000.
2:17
Instead, it would be closer to $140,000.
2:21
The simple reality is in a world in
2:23
which in order to afford to rent or buy
2:26
a home, you need a second income, child
2:29
care becomes a very real component of
2:31
it. We're actually seeing more and more
2:33
households who are incapable of clearing
2:35
that threshold for participation in the
2:37
modern economy. The last 50 years has
2:40
seen an extraordinary tax cut for the
2:42
wealthiest Americans and an
2:43
extraordinary tax hike for those in kind
2:46
of the 20th to 80th percentile. Ignoring
2:49
that is really at the core of the issue.
2:50
And that would mean millions of people
2:53
who consider themselves to be middle
2:55
class by the original definition and the
2:58
original logic of the government are
3:01
instead actually living in the
3:03
modern-day equivalent of poverty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3-wTqnzJvI

The median wage in America today is $23.11 and I've been saying 120 hours per week is what is needed today to make a family of 4 solidly middle class. That's $144,000 per year. I would put the poverty level for a family of 4 at somewhere around $90,000.

I haven't watched all of the video yet. I saw the discussion about food being the largest part of a family's budget in 1968. Again, they weren't eating factory farmed meat back then so, comparing apples and apples, food is much more expensive than what most people actually pay today if someone is applying standards from 50-60 years ago.

Just put it up to show that my numbers might be too low in some people's opinions.

[Higgenbotham]

Here are a few examples of how a family can think about an approximate middle class lifestyle on less than $140,000 per year.

I spent a lot of hours to find a source of beef after the local pharmacy stopped carrying their source of high quality, reasonably priced beef. Finally found a woman who is old school and has been ranching for 50 years. I think her sons run the ranch day to day now and she moved closer to the city. She said that she wants families to be able to afford healthy food. I bring cash to her house and she charges me $6 per pound. The meat is grass fed grass finished and is excellent. Her beef is about the only meat we eat nowadays. I'll buy salmon now and then when it's on sale for $13 per pound (this is Texas). For cereal, I buy 50 pound bags of organic oatmeal for $1.07 per pound plus a nominal charge of maybe $3 per bag to ship it. I have to drive about 14 miles to pick it up. I get 3 bags at a time and that's about the only cereal my kid ever eats. They have rolled rye too maybe a little cheaper and we eat that now and then, as well as a few other things they sell. As mentioned here, we grow all our own tomatoes now. I had to buy one jar of sauce before our harvest came in this year and the quality was not near as good as what we grow. It was very noticeable after eating our own for so long. As quality continues to deteriorate and prices continue to rise, more items will come exclusively from our back yard.

I have a 2001 Corolla and a 2003 Camry. I'm the original owner of the Corolla and both are paid for. I also spent a bit of time to source the Camry. It is a one owner car and I bought it from a guy who retired as some kind of technical expert from the state government agency that regulates the electrical grid. I paid him $4,200 for it, which some would say is too much but my assessment of the car was that it is likely to be good for at least another 200K miles. So far, I haven't been disappointed. I do most of the maintenance on them. My wife got into an accident with the Camry. The other driver called the police and a report was written. Before I could get there, the cop had already unnecessarily called a tow (typical scam). The next day I went to the tow yard and told them to tow it to my garage. I hadn't had an at-fault accident or a claim since 2004. The insurance company did an investigation and determined my wife was not at fault so our rates will not be going up. They also voluntarily paid for the tow. But before they did that, I told both insurance companies that I would be doing all the repairs on the Camry. The driver's side window was smashed out, the driver's side mirror, front bumper, fender, and headlight have to be replaced. Two of the lug nuts were fused on and I had to twist the stems off by hand to get the tire off. Today I got the door disassembled with no issues to get ready to replace the window. Right now I've got the second round of Valvoline Restore and Protect in the Camry. It uses about a quart of oil every 2,500 miles and I hope to improve that or at least keep it there. At 183K miles, it runs about perfect. The insurance on the cars is $606 per year for the Corolla and $635 per year for the Camry. We don't carry collision but I have an umbrella liability policy that only makes it necessary to have 100K of liability on the cars.

It probably would have been relevant at some point in this dark age hovel to say that post 1971 Toyota produced probably the best vehicles that have ever been made. If you are driving a well maintained 1998 Camry in 2026, probably you have an overall better and more reliable car than anything that could have been purchased in 1971, new or used. A couple months ago, when both Toyotas happened to be sitting out in the driveway, a Mexican woman knocked on the door and asked me if I wanted to sell them. Why would I want to?

Most middle class Americans have a spending problem. They think they need things that they flat out don't need. They can do fine on a lot less than $140,000 per year.

There is another side to that, though, and that other side is what predominates and is mostly discussed here because it is the side that currently matters.