Finance: 140k for the Basics in the USA
After reading the article in Zerohedge, "America's Feast-Or-Famine Reality... When $100,000 Feels Like Poverty," I need to understand what the average salary is for, for example, a job I once did: In 2025, the average salary, total pay, pay by experience level, top salaries, and jobs by location for architectural drafters ... An architectural drafter in the US earns an average of $46,790 gross per year, which is about $3,900 gross per month. A starting average salary would me 35k in 2025.Well, and that's the average, meaning in Florida, it would be a lower if full-time. My job, like many others, actually was only part-time for a small local company. I worked two other part-time jobs to make ends meet, more or less, until the 2008 housing crisis upended my precarious family budgeting act.In the article, according to stats, one man did:“I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a basic needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the ‘Participation Tickets’ required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024.Using conservative, national-average data:Childcare: $32,773Housing: $23,267Food: $14,717Transportation: $14,828Healthcare: $10,567Other essentials: $21,857Required net income: $118,009Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.This is Orshansky’s ‘too little’ threshold, updated honestly. This is the floor.”However, the official U.S. data lists 30k as the poverty line. In fact, families need a lot more, and in this data, 140k is just for basics.So we're seeing the fall of fiat currencies, paper money devalued in real time, and all the world's currencies, if no longer trading in dollars, still pegging their currencies to the U.S. dollar as a benchmark. However, with the increased politicalization of currencies, the U.S. dollar simply cannot function as a reserve currency anymore; in fact, it probably doesn't. And the sooner nations cut loose and demand real payment, the better.
After reading the article in Zerohedge, "America's Feast-Or-Famine Reality... When $100,000 Feels Like Poverty," I need to understand what the average salary is for, for example, a job I once did: In 2025, the average salary, total pay, pay by experience level, top salaries, and jobs by location for architectural drafters ... An architectural drafter in the US earns an average of $46,790 gross per year, which is about $3,900 gross per month. A starting average salary would me 35k in 2025.Well, and that's the average, meaning in Florida, it would be a lower if full-time. My job, like many others, actually was only part-time for a small local company. I worked two other part-time jobs to make ends meet, more or less, until the 2008 housing crisis upended my precarious family budgeting act.In the article, according to stats, one man did:“I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a basic needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the ‘Participation Tickets’ required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024.Using conservative, national-average data:Childcare: $32,773Housing: $23,267Food: $14,717Transportation: $14,828Healthcare: $10,567Other essentials: $21,857Required net income: $118,009Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.This is Orshansky’s ‘too little’ threshold, updated honestly. This is the floor.”However, the official U.S. data lists 30k as the poverty line. In fact, families need a lot more, and in this data, 140k is just for basics.So we're seeing the fall of fiat currencies, paper money devalued in real time, and all the world's currencies, if no longer trading in dollars, still pegging their currencies to the U.S. dollar as a benchmark. However, with the increased politicalization of currencies, the U.S. dollar simply cannot function as a reserve currency anymore; in fact, it probably doesn't. And the sooner nations cut loose and demand real payment, the better.