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“People are paying, like, a little better when it comes to wages, but it’s still not reaching a livable wage, or what I would call thrivable; it’s more like a subsistence level,” said Mr. Rosenthal, who lives with his mother to save money.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued for wages that would provide workers with “more than a bare subsistence level. I mean the wages of a decent living.”

In areas like western Guatemala, where coconut, corn and banana plantations stretch along the highway, many people scrape by at a barely subsistence level.

In the three centuries since Thomas Newcomen deployed his primitive steam engine at a Staffordshire mine, we went from a world where the average person lived at subsistence level and half of children died before reaching adulthood to one where most children survive to their 15th birthdays and end up on average healthier, better fed, more lavishly entertained and more comfortable than a medieval king.

The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war.