Or, another scenario, the 'poverty line' is arbitrary and hardly an indicator of universal financial power.
In other words : the poverty salary 'line' tells you nothing of burden, it's just a magic number. If an individual has multiple unknown burdens, their 'poverty line' is at a much different , unknown, level.
I live in California, mostly. I know of families that live (far) below the 'Poverty Line', but because they send everything they can back to their home country for the rest of their family to live on.
Suddenly an individual at the poverty line is supporting 3-7 people in another country; and has no real legal way to justify or exemplify the practice in any legal financial way that would signify their increased burden - they become essentially a lost statistic and generally lie on their taxes due to fear of losing the arrangement.
Individuals that lead this style of life tend to go back home periodically simply because the burden of living in the US with a sub-poverty income isn't realistic.
tl;dr : The poverty income line alone means next to nothing in personal context. Don't assume that you can dwindle every persons' life down to fitting within it, that's not realistic. Saving money is absolutely important, I agree, but let's not just assume that that kind of financial flexibility exists for every individual. It'd be nice, but it's fantasy.
