00:00 Speaker A
Mike, before we get into that, I just wanted to explain how you arrived at that $140,000 number here, because you’re looking at different inputs, right? For the household expensive. So you use national data to calculate average child care, housing costs, then you’ve added in food, health care, taxes, transportation. These are all big numbers, then add in other essentials and that’s how you arrived at that total of $136,500 specifically. Now,
00:33 Speaker A
As you well know, there’s been a lot of argument around that number since you came up with that estimate, Mike, but I’m wondering what you think about the debate it’s generated and what you’ve taken from all of this back and forth.
00:54 Speaker B
Well, Julie, first of all, thank you. It’s fantastic graphics by the way. I think I’ll steal this for any current version of this. Yes, there has been a tremendous amount of debate surrounding it. I think a lot of it was a function of an ungenerous reading where people are actually trying to assert absolute versus relative levels of poverty.
01:17 Speaker B
Um, what the goal was for me was not to dig in and define a new poverty line. It was to understand what the average American household goes through. We constructed those figures from the Living Wage components of MIT. The real surprises are things like childcare, and as people rightly point out, childcare is not something that every family or household has to do. That’s why I focused very specifically on the experience of young families in America, trying to answer the
01:45 Speaker B
question, why don’t we see more forms of household? Why aren’t we seeing more babies being born considering millennials are now at the point where they should be at peak fertility levels. Um, the answer is very simple. It is very expensive to have children in the United States today. And the childcare one is the one that should jump out at people, especially when you think about components like the New York election and so on.
02:14 Speaker B
I think the thing that has scared both sides of the debate, the left is very scared, understandably, that this distracts from the officially poor, the ones who are really you know, who suffer real deprivation and real insecurities. 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 needs, for example, around childcare, because Mondami proposed government-run healthcare.
02:44 Speaker B
On the right, I’m horrified and others are horrified that this would end up being the proposed solution, right? A new government childcare bureaucracy, for example. And so on, on all fronts, we got a huge amount of pushback from the institutional or official sector. Really, the incredible thing was that I got over 10,000 messages and an incredible number of comments on the press vehicles, where people basically said, oh my God, someone really understands my life.
03:12 Speaker A
Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about it because I think there are political implications of this, there are economic implications of this, but we keep talking about and we’ve been talking for the last couple of years about the so-called vibecession. I was talking to a strategist this week about vibration pressure, the implication being that it’s gotten worse and there’s this gap between what the numbers are saying and what people are feeling. And depending on who is in office,
03:40 Speaker A
i tell people, well, you don’t really feel what you feel. And I think what this did was kind of help validate what some people are feeling. As if we weren’t 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 know this isn’t an easy environment.
04:03 Speaker B
Yes, I think that is correct. And I think the key thing that people need to understand is that a sizable portion of the U.S. population, especially those that we rely on to create future workers, future voters, and future taxpayers, say, guys, this is actually impossibly difficult, and it’s not a function of them being weak and unable to do it. The simple reality is in a world where to afford to rent or buy a home,
04:34 Speaker B
you need a second income. Childcare becomes a very real part of it. Historically, this might have been provided in the neighborhood or by family members. But often, the jobs that allow people to afford these opportunities are far from those support networks. And so this has become more and more of a reality for young families in the United States, and it’s just unbearable.