re: #539 RealityBasedSteve

The “poverty level” could use some reworking. It was a number pulled out of thin air in the ’60s, because they needed some numbers to get started with. IIRC it was 3 times the amount you needed to buy food, which worked reasonably well for a while because it automatically covered large and small families fairly equitably. A few decades on and food is a much smaller percentage of family budgets, housing is much more expensive, etc.