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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

> Many (most?) "poor" people work full-time jobs, but the pay from those jobs is simply inadequate to cover basic living expenses without drawing on external resources.

Most poor people are children under 18. I guess technically, you can work at 16, so some of them probably dropped out and work full-time, but it's definitely not the norm.

Most poor "adults" - are people >65 who aren't working full-time either.

Sure, most poor "18-65" year olds in the US work - but a large amount of these people that are "poor" are poor simply because they have kids (i.e. you're poor with the same wage if you have 2 kids but not if you have 0 kids) or because they work part-time... because they have kids.

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Hi! I worked for a nonprofit poverty advocacy center in Chicago. This is totally wrong, but it's stated so confidently. Why do you say this? What's the source you got this opinion from? Do you even know?

This is an opportunity for you to learn more about yourself and grow! For some reason it helps your ego/reinforces your worldview to believe (and repeat!) that "most poor people are children under 18 or seniors" which is easily disprovable. So you should think about why you want to believe that, and what about your worldview would need to change if you accepted that that's not true (because it absolutely isn't!).

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/10/poverty-rate-....

[2] https://econofact.org/employment-and-poverty

I should've added that college students make up a large chunk of poverty as well, and the disabled (non-working)...

Using conservative rates for child poverty, you get:

* ~32% of the entire poverty population is children <18

* ~18% are disabled and don't work

* ~16% is seniors

* ~10% is college students

* ~6.5% is single mothers

* ~6% don't work (either looking for work or not)

* ~10% is everyone else - including dual-parent HH, single father HH, disabled people that do work, etc...

The idea that most poor people (as defined by the definition of poverty in the US) are single people working full time jobs is not possible. The poverty line is BELOW a full-time minimum wage job, and it includes money received from government transfers like SNAP, etc...

Only ~29% of the poor work full-time jobs - because by definition it's quite difficult to work full-time and be "in poverty".

If your definition of poverty is something else - then sure - maybe most people in that "poverty" are full-time workers.

Your statement upthread, which I replied to:

> Most poor people are children under 18. I guess technically, you can work at 16, so some of them probably dropped out and work full-time, but it's definitely not the norm.

> Most poor "adults" - are people >65 who aren't working full-time either.

The first bullet point in your quoted source:

> Of the 40.6 million Americans living in poverty in 2016, 56.1 percent were working-age adults, 18 to 64. Important shares of those living in poverty are children and adults aged 65 and older (32.6 percent and 11.2 percent respectively, in 2016).

I don't know why you included all these other bullets in your response. Are you just hoping that by adding extraneous information, that it would make it seem like your original statement was correct? Or that you were saying something different from what you actually said?

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