OK, you and your spouse have one child and bring home over $17,330 per year. According to the US Census Bureau's fifty-year-old formulas, you're above the poverty threshold. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the actual threshold between working poverty and making a living is probably twice what Census cites, varying by where you live.

EPI offers this Basic Family Budget Calculator, and while there are no figures for Parent supporting grown offspring, Single Woman supporting two cats, or Uneuthanized Man living in a shack, you can choose something close, plug in your area and see the variations.

Making ends meet on $21,834 a year

Where in the country can a family of four keep a roof over its head and food on the table for $22,000 a year, before taxes, and still having something left over for health care and transportation? In 2007, EPI took a detailed look at basic costs in different parts of the country and built the Basic Family Budget Calculator, which assembled the costs of basic housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and other necessities in different regions of the country. Besides offering detailed data on how much costs vary across rural and urban areas and different geographic regions, the calculator shows that poverty thresholds are too low just about everywhere.

...

In examining different family budgets around the country, it is also worth noting that the federal minimum wage -- even after its July increase to $7.25 per hour -- equates to an annual salary of $14,500 per year based on a 2,000-hour work year, which is just barely above the 2008 poverty threshold of $14,051 for a family of two.

Of course, each family has its own unique set of expenses. Just as some may cut costs by sharing housing with relatives, others may face exceptionally steep costs in the form of gasoline and car maintenance for long commutes, or medical care for a special-needs child. While it would be impossible to account for all the variables affecting an individual family's housing, food, and other costs all around the country, the Family Budget Calculator attempts to get at the bare bones expenses. It estimates housing costs based on non-luxury, "privately-owned, decent, and safe rental housing" at the 40th percentile, or that which costs less than 60% of the rentals on the local market. Food cost estimates come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's "low-cost" food plan. Average transportation costs are based on the National Household Travel Survey and consider only travel related to work and other non-social purposes such as essential errands.

I found that in Altoona, two parents and a child would have to make $38,330 per year, while Baltimore would be only marginally more expensive - $39,088 per year. I don't know where EPI's figures come from, and I'm only poor the week before payday, but for me, living in Baltimore has been waaay more expensive than Altoona.

Update: If we move to the nearby planned community of Columbia, MD, EPI says we'll need $53,702 per year to make it. That difference agrees more with my experience, and I do live and work in Federal Hill - an expensive neighborhood probably more comparable to Columbia than to most of Baltimore City.

Critics of the Census Bureau's existing methodology for calculating poverty thresholds note that it is based on an outdated formula that was put in place in the 1960s, and has not evolved with family budgets. Not only have overall costs gone up since then, but the portion of incomes spent on food, housing and other essentials has changed dramatically. This commentary notes that during the 1960s, the typical family spent a third of its budget on food, but today food consumes just one-seventh of its budget on food, with other essentials such as health care consuming much more. If that would seem to suggest that food has gotten cheaper, it also highlights the problem of calculating poverty as a multiple of food costs, under the formula that was established decades ago and is still used today. The Census Bureau acknowledges that because of this longstanding formula, it is no longer possible to say what share of a poverty-level income would go toward specific categories of consumption. Simply adjusting food costs for inflation over the past 40 years, in other words, would not be enough to keep the poverty threshold current.