It depends whether it takes two earners to reach $250,000 per year. Consider two single-parent families, each with two children, each earning $125,000 per year. To me, that's middle-class -- barely, when you consider the amount of paid help (e.g. day-care) required.

Now, suppose these two married -- resulting in a single family with two earners and four children. It boggles the mind to think that a simple marriage licence could make six middle-class people rich.

So maybe you should measure wealth by dividing the income by a weighted average of the number of family members, giving a heavier weight to adults in the family.

If you want to argue that two can live as cheaply as one, and that a married family is indeed richer than two smaller families at the same income-per-person, then the most important thing the government could possibly do as an anti-poverty measure would be to strongly discourage single motherhood. (What can you say about a government that would financially penalize sexual morality in order to better subsidize fornicators?)

fsilber:

So maybe you should measure wealth by dividing the income by a weighted average of the number of family members, giving a heavier weight to adults in the family.

That's close to how the Congressional Budget Office does it in their income statistics. They multiply household income by the square root of the number of household members in order to produce comparable levels of well being. Thus $100k for a single person is equivalent to $140K for a couple and $200k for a family of four.

For the last year for which CBO data is available, which I think is 2005 or 2006, the lower boundary of the top 1% of household incomes was just above $300K for a single person.

But when expenses get shared, you can save a lot. So combining incomes is actually more than just a simple sum of their salaries. Housing, utilities, etc. all go down in the some to a lot range (very precise, I know!)

FSilber asks: What can you say about a government that would financially penalize sexual morality in order to better subsidize fornicators?

LeRoy: I don't know. Maybe a government that is encouraging the pursuit of happiness?

I guess the opposite would be something like, well, Saudi Arabia. They behead adulterers over there.

At least the female ones.

LeRoy_Was_Here:

FSilber asks: What can you say about a government that would financially penalize sexual morality in order to better subsidize fornicators?

LeRoy: I don't know. Maybe a government that is encouraging the pursuit of happiness?

I guess the opposite would be something like, well, Saudi Arabia. They behead adulterers over there.

At least the female ones.

You're confusing happiness with transient pleasure, and self-indulgence. Yes, the opposite would be something like Saudi Arabia. I guess this is why all the great philosophers preached moderation and the golden mean. Americans were truly privileged to have been blessed with superior religions that wisely avoided both extremes.