Finally, Someone Did the Math
Michael Green’s “My Life Is a Lie” is going viral because he proved something I’ve been trying to show with a psychology framework: the poverty line is a lie, and that lie is breaking people who are told they should be fine.
I built Hierarchy Budget because I believed that mapping spending to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs would reveal what traditional budgeting hides. I’m not a finance guy. I’m someone who read Maslow’s original 1943 paper and thought: this explains why people who “should” be comfortable feel broke, and why people drowning in bills can’t think their way out.
But I couldn’t prove it with numbers. I could only show people their pyramid and ask: “Does this match how you feel?”
Green just proved it with numbers.
The Math
The official poverty line for a family of four is $31,200. It’s based on a 1963 formula: three times the cost of a minimum food budget. Back then, families spent about a third of their income on groceries.
Today, food is 5-7% of household spending. Housing is 35-45%. Healthcare is 15-25%. Childcare can hit 40%.
Green updates Orshansky’s formula honestly. The multiplier isn’t three anymore. It’s sixteen. Which puts the real poverty threshold—the floor below which families cannot function without assistance—somewhere around $140,000.
The median household income is $80,000.
That means the median American family, the one we call “middle class,” is living in what Orshansky would have called crisis. They’re $60,000 below the line where basic needs can actually be met.
What Maslow Told Us
Here’s what I’ve been trying to show with the pyramid:
Maslow wrote that when lower needs are chronically unmet, they dominate consciousness.
“For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food.”[^1]
The chronically hungry person believes, genuinely believes, that if they could just get enough to eat, they’d be satisfied forever. Bread becomes the entire world.
This is what the bandwidth tax looks like from the inside. When survival consumes your resources, it also consumes your mind. You can’t think past it. You can’t plan beyond it. The higher needs—connection, growth, meaning—don’t disappear, but they go dormant. You don’t have the cognitive capacity to feel their absence because you’re too busy trying to make rent.
Green’s numbers show who’s living in this state: anyone below $140,000 who’s paying market rates for childcare, housing, and healthcare. Which is most of America.
The Other Half
But Maslow said something else too, and this is the part that makes the trap so cruel:
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be.”[^2]
Man does not live by bread alone. When physiological needs are met, safety needs emerge. When safety is met, the need for connection emerges. Then esteem. Then self-actualization. Each level, once it awakens, demands attention with the same psychological force as hunger.
The hierarchy isn’t a ladder you climb and finish. It’s a set of needs that all require tending. Neglect the bottom and you starve. Neglect the top and you wither. Both states are suffering.
Here’s the trap: the family at $80,000 is told they’ve made it. They’re “middle class.” They should be grateful. They should be thinking about growth, connection, meaning—the higher needs.
But they can’t. Because 88% of their income goes to physiological and safety needs that never quite get satisfied. The bottom of the pyramid is a hungry mouth that swallows everything. There’s nothing left for the higher needs, and no bandwidth left to even notice they’re starving at the top while drowning at the bottom.
Green calls this the Valley of Death: the income range where you earn too much to qualify for assistance but not enough to actually survive without it. I’d call it chronic deprivation with a middle-class label.
The Bandwidth Tax
Mullainathan and Shafir’s research on scarcity showed that poverty taxes cognitive capacity directly:
“Being poor reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.”[^3]
When your pyramid is bottom-heavy, you’re not just financially constrained. You’re cognitively constrained. You have less capacity for planning, impulse control, strategic thinking. The bandwidth you’d need to budget your way out is consumed by the stress of not having enough.
This is why telling people to “just budget better” is so cruel. The people who most need to budget well are the people whose cognitive resources are most taxed by scarcity. It’s like telling someone to run faster while you’re standing on their legs.
Green proved this trap exists in the aggregate. The pyramid shows you whether you’re in it personally.
What the Pyramid Shows
When you map your spending to Maslow’s hierarchy, you’re not doing an accounting exercise. You’re answering the question: which human needs are actually getting met?
If 75% or more goes to physiological and safety, you’re in chronic deprivation at the base—regardless of what your income “should” mean. You’re living in the state Maslow described: bread is your whole world, not because you’re small-minded but because you’re surviving.
If the higher levels are nearly empty—love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization—you’re seeing the cost of that deprivation. Not just in dollars, but in the human needs that are going unfed.
The pyramid doesn’t lie. The official poverty line does.
Why This Matters
I built Hierarchy Budget because I thought people deserved to see what their spending actually reveals about their lives. Not categories like “fixed” and “discretionary”—those are accounting fictions. But categories like “survival,” “security,” “connection,” “growth.” The things we actually need to be human.
Green’s analysis validates what the pyramid shows. The $80,000 family whose pyramid is 88% physiological and safety isn’t bad at budgeting. They’re living in what Orshansky would have called poverty, updated for 2026 costs. They feel broke because they are broke, no matter what the official line says.
And they can’t think their way out because the bandwidth tax is real. Scarcity captures the mind. The cognitive resources required for long-term planning are consumed by short-term survival.
See for Yourself
Green gave us the macroeconomic proof. Maslow gave us the psychology. Mullainathan and Shafir gave us the cognitive mechanism.
The pyramid gives you the personal diagnosis.
Map your spending. See what percentage goes to physiological and safety needs. See what’s left for everything else. See whether your hierarchy matches what the economy tells you you should feel—or whether it matches what you actually feel.
If the bottom dominates, you’re not failing. You’re living in an economy that defines poverty by whether you can afford groceries, in an era when groceries are the one thing almost everyone can afford.
The real question is whether you can afford to live. And now, thanks to Green, we have a number for that.
It’s about $140,000.
Below that line, the pyramid will show you why you feel the way you do. Above it, you might finally have the bandwidth to ask what you actually want.
Either way, the pyramid doesn’t lie.
[^1]: Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396.
[^2]: Maslow, A.H. (1943). “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review, 50(4), 370-396.
[^3]: Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.
Michael W. Green’s “Part 1: My Life Is a Lie” was published November 23, 2025. Abraham Maslow’s “A Theory of Human Motivation” was published in Psychological Review in 1943.