Rochester, New York has a cost of living that’s closest to the national average across 509 U.S. metropolitan areas.
A single adult living in Rochester needs at least US$30,000 a year to cover the cost of housing, food, transportation and other basic needs.
San Francisco is the U.S. city with the highest cost of living, affording just the basics costs $47,587, mainly due to significantly higher taxes and rents.
The city with the lowest cost of living is Beckley, West Virginia. Even there, a childless worker still needs to earn about $28,200 to make essential ends meet.
Costs add up quickly for households with more than one person. Two adults in Rochester need over $48,000 a year, while a single parent with one child needs more than $63,000. In San Francisco, a single parent would need to earn $101,000 a year just to scrape by.
At least 27 million U.S. workers don’t earn enough to hit that very low threshold of $30,000. This is a conservative estimate and that the number of people with jobs who earn less than what’s necessary to afford the necessities of life is likely much higher.
The majority of those 27 million workers are concentrated in two industries: retail trade and leisure and hospitality. These two industries are among America’s largest employers and pay the lowest average wages.
For example, the median salary for cashiers was $28,850 in early 2020, with 2.5 million of the nation’s 5 million cashiers earning less than that. Or take retail sales. There, 75% of workers – about 1.8 million – were earning less than $27,080 a year. Close to a million waiters and waitresses were earning less than the median income of $23,740.
The federal poverty line is unrealistically low – only $12,880 for an individual. The official poverty line was created to determine eligibility for Medicaid and other government benefits that support low-income people, not to indicate how much a person needs to actually get by.
Unless Congress and the Biden administration act quickly, 7.5 million people are set to entirely lose unemployment insurance (UI) aid on Labor Day, Sept. 6, the official nationwide expiration date of Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). The looming UI expiration is the largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history. Another 3 million unemployed workers will lose the $300-per-week federal boost provided through the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program. Twenty-six states — all of which are led by Republicans except Louisiana — ended federal pandemic benefits early, heightening the economic desperation of millions of people.
7.5 Million Americans to Lose Jobless Benefits on Labor Day – Consortiumnews
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