Neil Freiman

He put things like health care at $10,000, transportation $15,000 per year, food $15,000, housing $23,000.

So he just runs it down and says, well, if you want to afford life's basic necessities, you really need to be making $136,000.

Right.

So bottom line, economists are saying that it was a faulty premise to begin with because this is the wrong definition of poverty and then use faulty data to back it up.

That said, this certainly sparked a debate and a wider discussion around how we should define poverty, affordability, things like that in our economy, because.

I think everyone generally agrees that certain things that he focused on child care, health care, housing, those have all definitely gotten more expensive.

They're putting more burden on American families.

And they all agree, too, that the poverty measure that was established in 1963 is generally not a good way to measure poverty.

There are some other measures out there called the supplemental poverty measure.

And that brings in things like utilities, housing, health care, things like that.

But, yeah.

Certainly sparked a discussion, and I think people do want to know why everyone's feeling so crappy.

All right, welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I pick two things that have a great answer to, so, how was your Thanksgiving?

I won the pre-show Who Came Home With More Leftovers contest, so I get to go first.

And my winner is the stock market, because even with all this chatter about 1999 or even 1929...

It continues to get back up every time it's knocked down.

Stocks staged a quiet but furious rally over Thanksgiving week to close within 1% of record highs, at least for now, quieting all the bears who warned that an AI bubble would cause a meltdown.

Over a five-day rally, the S&P 500 rose 3.7% for its best week in six months, led by a resurgent Google who restored confidence in the AI trade.

Just 11 days ago, the index was down more than 5% in November.

It closed in the green for the month.