Marriage Makes You Rich and Stupid
Conservatives are fond of pointing out that if you wait to have kids until you get married, graduate from high school and work full time, you are vanishingly unlikely to be poor. Matthew Yglesias argues that this finding is less exciting than it sounds; it's basically a combination of arithmetic and the way that the federal poverty line is calculated:
If you look up the Federal Poverty Guidelines you'll see that the way it works is that one person is poor if he or she earns less than $11,490. But due to household economies of scale, the FPG says that for two people to be non-poor they need to make $15,510 not $22,980. Indeed, the poverty line for a family of three is only $19,530 -- less than double the poverty line for one. Basically poverty is $11,490 for the first person plus $4,020 for each additional person.
