Not when basics like rent, food, and healthcare eat up the majority of that 45k

There's only so much you can reduce your lifestyle before you're literally just living to work anyways

The US has one of the highest median incomes adjusted for cost of living in the world:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income

(You're welcome to complain. I'm just clarifying that insofar as this is a problem, it is very much not exclusive to the United States.)

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