$96,000 a year; retired teacher, no savings or pension

In the strange world we live in The Washington Post reports on the debt, hunger, and eviction of "households on the margins," and included examples concern an American who was earning $96,000 a year pre-pandemic as well as a retired English teacher who has no savings and no pension, living off a meager Social Security payment of $870 a month while housing a grandchild. I'm not sure that "the average American" is a reader of The Washington Post, but in a country where median household income is about $66,000 (combined pay of all workers in the household), and most people do not have fixed-income pensions to look forward to while imagining that most K-12 teachers are among the chosen few who will receive them, I suspect that readers would have trouble relating to these examples. Of course, we may be well past the point where "the average American" reads more than the headlines or attempts to analyze any information at all.