Subsistence Threshold as an Admissibility Criterion: A Recomputable Measure of US Household Sufficiency

This paper proposes an admissibility criterion composed of exactly two quantities, m = disposable flow minus subsistence threshold, and recomputes it year by year for the United States over 2019-2026 using official statistics and county-level budget data. The threshold is taken from the county market replacement cost of a household survival budget rather than from the policy poverty line. Results: the 2024 threshold for a single adult ranges from USD 24,180 in the lowest-cost county to USD 77,820 in Manhattan, with USD 29,460 in the median county, or 1.61 to 5.17 times the official poverty line of USD 15,060; 41.3 per cent of households fall below their local threshold, of which 28.8 per cent lie above the poverty line and therefore enter no official poverty statistic, making the subsistence count 3.30 times the official count; national personal income equals 2.50 times the aggregate subsistence cost under the median county and 3.05 times under the lowest-cost county, so the aggregate is sufficient to cover basic survival for the whole population with margin remaining; real output grew 9.95 per cent from 2019 to 2024 while the number of households below the threshold grew 9.50 per cent; in 2025 the official poverty rate fell to 10.2 per cent and real median household income rose to USD 87,460, both the best readings on record, in the same year that the ALICE Essentials Index raised survival cost by about 5.6 per cent against income growth of 2.6 per cent; federal interest now absorbs 25.2 per cent of federal revenue and 71.6 per cent of the deficit, and net new fiscal space of USD 0.54 trillion is less than a third of the cost of a 2008-scale recession. The criterion therefore reports not the degree of hardship but the number of shocks that can be absorbed; on 2026 data that number is exhausted at both the household and the national level.