Poke around. Your figure, which I don't dispute, is $980 a week, or $24.51 an hour. zoom around and find the places where the living wage is appreciably below that. Here's the calcs, by the way. What it tells you is that pretty much nation-wide, median income is within a couple bucks an hour of living wage for a single earner. Not a lot of savings possible, not a lot of opportunity to get ahead, buy a house, save for retirement. Median living wage for the United States is $15.84 an hour so, the difference between median wage and living wage is around $19k a year. We can dicker at the margins but that's about 20 grand, give or take, between subsistence and success. How fast do you think a family can burn through $20k if they want to have a little fun or go on vacation or get sick? Then there's this: Really, we're all busting our asses to get back to the Clinton era. It's the sort of reality that makes the proletariat resentful.