If You Want to Join the Middle Class, Get a Full Time Job
More advice from a think tank plus some pie charts
For the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about the Success Sequence and its relevance to life in 2024. To recap, the Success Sequence is a sequence of life choices that are supposed to increase your likelihood of escaping or avoiding poverty in the United States. It’s recommended by the Brookings Institution, and was a reaction to increasing poverty after the Great Recession. It’s currently a favorite talking point of the right wing and upperclass Democrats in the US.
The sequence is:
Graduate high school
Get a full-time job
Get married before having children
We’re on number 2 of the pathway to success- Getting a full-time job after high school.
A reminder- what is the middle class?
Like all things, the middle class is a social construct and can be defined in so many different ways. The definition I’m using is the Washington Post’s definition.
Is close to the median income for an area
Is within the middle 60% of incomes in an area
How far away an income is from the poverty level
I’m also using the federal poverty guidelines to measure “middle class,” because many sources that consider the Success Sequence to be relevant and valid equate “escaping poverty” with “joining the middle class.” I don’t know how accurate this is, but it’s helpful to have this binary when evaluating their claims.
How does having a full-time job correlate with joining the middle class?
There are two main federal measurements for what constitutes poverty; the federal poverty guideline, and the Census Bureau’s poverty threshold. The poverty guideline is used to evaluate eligibility for Federal programs like SNAP, Medicaid, etc. It’s a set income level that changes every year and is based on household size.
The poverty threshold is used by the Census and is more nuanced; it differentiates between the ages and configurations of households. Its purpose is to track poverty, not to determine benefit eligibility. This statistic is called the Official Poverty Measure (OPM.)
For example, for benefit eligibility, the poverty guideline for 2023 was $30,000 or less. The poverty threshold for 2023, for a family of four that includes one adult and three children is $31,008. For a family of four consisting of 2 adults and 2 children, the number changes to $30,900.
According to the Census Bureau, in 2021, 11.6% of Americans were below the federal poverty threshold. That represents around 37.9 million people. Out of this number, 44.6% were either over 65 or under 18, leaving 20,982,000 Americans of working age. Out of those of working age, 9.7% worked a full-time.
Almost 90% of working-aged adults below the poverty threshold were either unemployed or worked part-time. It looks like getting a full-time job is a ticket out of poverty. Seems so simple. However…
Who does this leave out?
Of that same almost 21 million working-aged adults in poverty, 19% were disabled, according to the Social Security Administration’s definition. This number does not include those who are pending SSA disability or are unable to apply for it.
For the remaining 81%, we don’t know what’s going on with them. We do know that only 23.9% of 25-year-olds and up below the poverty threshold had less education than a high school diploma. In fact, 15.3% of this figure have gotten a Bachelors degree or higher.
We also know that the 81% of poor adults between 18-65 who are not disabled doesn’t include people pending SSA disability, or unable to apply for disability. We know that this number doesn’t include those who are full time caretakers of elderly or disabled family members. It doesn’t tell us how many of these people are parents with multiple children below school age, or in between careers.
In Summary
“Get a full time job” is more convincing than the “get a high school diploma.” “Get a full time job” is still missing a lot of context, but at least has the data to back it up.
Next week, we’ll look at the last one, get married before having children.