[aguyfromnb]

The fact that you have have to stipulate that one can live without roommates and "all basic needs are met" with a $200,000 salary proves the OP's point. That's more than 6 times the median annual income in the US.

The median home price in the Bay area is ~$1.5 million, so at $200k salary you'd be stretched with that kind of mortgage. Most homes where I'm from aren't worth $200k. What about child care, and the cost of commuting? You might not be "scraping by" on $200k in SV, but should that even be remotely a concern at a white-collar job working for some of the biggest companies on the planet?

[throwawaymath]

No, my stipulations don't prove OP's point, and it's concerning to me that so many people think they do. Believe it or not, there is a vast underclass of people who live and work in San Francisco who are actually struggling because they make less than half that. They don't work in tech and they can't even think about these problems because of the more pressing ones they're facing.

You're talking about things like buying a house and finding non-familial child care; these are people worried about receiving government assistance for food and finding affordable rent with bad credit and almost intractable debt. They're scraping by because they wish they could "stretch" a salary like $200k to afford any home and make day care work. Most Americans do not pay for child care, and wouldn't expect to.

I'm going to double down and reiterate here: just because you can't do all the things you want to do doesn't mean you're scraping by. That's a disingenuous definition of the term. If you consider $200k to be "scraping by", what do you call the people who will actually be looking after your kids in day care? How much do you suppose they earn per year?

[grammarxcore]

Having grown up below the poverty line, I'll double down on my original point as well. Most people don't work in tech and most people get screwed. The idea behind minimum wage is to provide all the necessities to everyone, be it housing, childcare, or food. When I interviewed with Google my Uber drivers all talked about how they had been forced to further and further suburbs because of tech workers and the rising cost of housing. I'm not bashing people on government assistance. Instead, I think more should be done for them by people like us.

That being said, you have just proved my point. If I can buy a house in Austin for half the starting salary in the Bay Area then, by that metric, if I can't in the Bay Area, I'm just scraping by.