[mkr-hn]

I don't see a claim in those links that people at the bottom rung have $20k in disposable income. I can't imagine they even have $20k a year to begin with. Your claims are very different from my experience living close enough to that bottom rung to know people in it.

[dllthomas]

In the second link there is a graph entitled "Disposable Income for a Hypothetical Single Parent with One Child, by Earnings", which doesn't fall below $20k. Of course, it may not be correct to generalize it, and it is incorrect to present it as "per person" since it represents two people - parent and child.

[yummyfajitas]

You can get consumption data from the BLS, which gives similar numbers:

http://www.bls.gov/cex/22013/midyear/income.pdf

You'll need to dig in to figure out what a "referent person" is.

[dllthomas]

Please explain how this supports your figure. I don't see it. Dividing the consumer unit "average annual expenditure" by the "average number of persons per consumer unit" per column there, only the top two exceed $20k, and only the top 3 approach $20k. It does all exceed $10k, but there's still 27 million households spending less than $15k/yr/person - where it would be more correct to say "about $10k" than "about $20k".

[yummyfajitas]

My mistake, I missed the fact that consumer units had multiple people in them. I thought those figures were for individuals.

[dllthomas]

Gotcha.