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The poverty line keeps getting pushed up because it has been redefined to mean people in the lower bottom half of society. There will always be a bottom half. Even in “communist” societies, there is a bottom half. The reality is with the exception of substance abusers who don’t want to quit, no one in America is actually materially deprived to the point of hunger or being homeless. Heritage explains:

https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/commentary/obamas-policies-redefine-poverty
[A new Heritage Foundation study reminds us that America’s “poor” maintain a standard of living much of the world would envy. Typically, “poor” Americans have more living space than the average European. Plus air conditioning, cable TV, and computer games. They are well-fed, and report they are not hungry.

They usually have a refrigerator, stove plus microwave, washer and dryer, dishwasher, and cell phone. That’s the case in most households that our government defines as “in poverty.”

Most of America’s “poor” own a car. A third have two cars. And 43 percent own their homes.

By defining poverty so broadly, we drain resources that instead could be focused on those who truly are in dire straits. And we spend billions that could be cut from the budget instead.

Because we overdefine and oversubsidize “poverty,” the Census Bureau reports that we have 43 million poor people. To help them, we spend over $900 billion a year in federal and state dollars. Do the math. We spend more than $20,000 apiece for each person deemed poor. For a family of four, that’s $80,000. And it’s on top of what they may earn for themselves.

We spend it through over 70 means-tested programs that give cash, food, housing, medical care, and more. As the Census Bureau explains, “The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).”

The new Heritage Foundation study (“Air Conditioning, Cable TV, and an Xbox: What Is Poverty in the United States Today?”) pulls these numbers together out of official reports from a variety of federal agencies into a coherent picture.

As Heritage authors Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield conclude, “Most of the persons whom the government defines as ‘in poverty’ are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term.”]