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Comment by laser | Hacker News Reader

Twice the poverty level sounds pretty comfortable to me. Living on 75% of that in LA right now. The "Further, 2.6 million of those 8.5 million downwardly mobile workers and their spouses will have incomes below the poverty level — $11,670 for an individual and $15,730 for a two-person household." sounds like real poverty, though.

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> Twice the poverty level sounds pretty comfortable to me. Living on 75% of that in LA right now.

Which is substantially easier in your 20s and 30s than in your 50s and 60s.

Yeh that's fair, but will more tax create more easiness for people?

> Which is substantially easier in your 20s and 30s than in your 50s and 60s.

Huh? In your 20s and 30s you’re paying to build your pension, paying for your mortgage, paying for your kids, paying for your student debts.

In your 50s and 60s you’re paying for none of that. What are you paying for at all?

Healthcare.

Except for “student debts” (which isn't all that uncommon, either) it's common for people to be paying for all those things in their 50s and 60s (adult children very often get support from their parents), and it's also quite common for people these days not to have started paying for any of then except retirement (usually not pension, except insofar as social security is a pension) building through their 30s.

It's pretty likely you aren't doing much retirement savings or paying for a mortgage on an income below double the poverty level at any age.

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