00:00 Speaker A
Mike, before we dive into it, I just wanted to walk through how you got to that $140,000 number here because you’re looking at various inputs, right? To household expensive. So you use national data to calculate average child care, housing costs, then you added up food, healthcare, taxes, transportation here. All these are high numbers, and then you add other essentials and that’s how you got to that total of $136,500 specifically. Now,
00:33 Speaker A
as you well know, there’s been a lot of arguments around this number since you came out with this estimate, Mike, but I I wonder what your take is on the debate that this has engendered and what you’ve taken away from kind of all this back and forth.
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 that for any any current any future versions of this. Um, yeah, there’s been an extraordinary amount of debate around it. I think much of it has been a function of an ungenerous reading where people are effectively trying to assert absolute versus relative levels of poverty.
01:17 Speaker B
Um, what was the entire point for me was not to actually dig in and define a new poverty line. It was to understand what the average American household was experiencing. I built those numbers up from the MIT living wage components. The real surprises are things like child care, and as people correctly note, child care is not something that every family or every household has to do. That’s why I was very specifically focusing on the experience of young families in America, trying to answer the
01:45 Speaker B
question, why aren’t we not seeing more household formation? Why are we not seeing more children being born given that the millennials are now at the point at which they should be at peak fertility levels. Um, the answer is very simple. It is super expensive to have children in the United States today. And childcare one is the one that should be jumping out at people, particularly when you’re thinking about components like the New York City elections, etc.
02:14 Speaker B
I think the thing that frightened both sides of the the debate, the left is very frightened understandably that this distracts the focus from the officially poor, those who are genuinely you know, suffering true deprivation and true insecurity. And on the right, there’s just an incredible fear of opening the idea of more progressive taxation and the idea that there could be institutional needs, for example, around child care as Mondami has proposed government-driven healthcare.
02:44 Speaker B
On the right, I am terrified and others are terrified that that would end up being the solution that is proposed, right? A new government bureaucracy of child care, for example. And so on on all fronts, we got a tremendous amount of pushback from the institutional or the official sector. Truly, the incredible thing was I received in excess of 10,000 messages and an incredible number of comments on press vehicles where people basically said, oh my gosh, somebody actually understands my life.
03:12 Speaker A
Well, and and this is what’s so interesting about it because I think um there are political implications of this, there are economic implications of this, but we keep talking about and we’ve been talking about for the past couple of years the so-called vibecession. I was talking with one strategist this week about the vibe pressure, the implication being it’s gotten worse and that there is this gap between what the numbers say and how people feel. And depending on who’s in office,
03:40 Speaker A
they kind of tell people, well, you’re not really feeling what you’re feeling. And so I guess this what this does did was sort of help to validate what what some people are feeling. Like we’re not just making 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’re you know, this is not an easy environment.
04:03 Speaker B
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think that’s really the critical thing for people to understand is is that a sizable fraction of the US population, particularly those who are we are relying on to create the future workers and future voters and future taxpayers, um, are saying, guys, this is this is actually impossibly difficult and it’s not a function of them being weak and incapable of doing it. The simple reality is in a world in which in order to afford to rent or buy a home,
04:34 Speaker B
you need a second income. Childcare becomes a very real component of it. Historically, that could have been provided in the neighborhood or by family members. But often times, the jobs that allow people to afford these opportunities are far away from those support networks. And so this has become the increasing reality for young families in the United States and it’s simply untenable.