The official poverty line badly understates how much it costs to get by in America today, which means far more people are struggling than the numbers admit.

• The government's poverty measure was built decades ago around a family of four whose biggest expense was food.
• People now spend much less of their income on food and far more on housing, health care, child care, transportation, insurance, debt, and taxes.
• Those costs were never built into the formula, so poverty looks like it has barely grown.
• Michael Green argues that if the line were based on what essentials actually cost today, it would sit near $140,000 a year instead of $31,000.
• That would put millions of people who think of themselves as middle class in the modern equivalent of poverty.

Outlook: Expect more pressure to rewrite how poverty is measured as the gap between official numbers and household reality keeps widening.