Here's the reality of it and while there is definitely regional and similar bias in this analysis it is why I've argued you cannot do "trickle down" or even "wage up" sort of adjustments and solve this problem or even meaningfully address it.
But everything changed between 1963 and 2024.
Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling. Transportation costs rose as cities sprawled and public transit withered under government neglect.
....
Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200.
It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000.
That can't happen; the median income is roughly $60,000.
If you more than doubled it the inflationary impact would be both insane and you'd be right back where you started, but now the "poverty line" is $250,000. You've made no progress at all.
Therefore you must collapse cost.
Supply and demand are not suggestions; that is the first law of economics and it is never wrong, nor will it ever be wrong.