In other words, the whole idea that more than half of Americans are poor doesn’t fit with anything we know about the lifestyles that typical Americans actually live. That’s why our intuition should be sounding the alarm like crazy when we read a line like “the real poverty line is $140,000”. We’re not talking about aliens from Mars here. Most of us either are middle class, or know people who are, and they don’t lack the basic necessities of life. They aren’t missing their “participation tickets”.