Didn't mean to switch between household and individual, good catch.
While part of my agrees with you that in some areas 50k/yr gets eaten up quickly we are looking at having $500 or $1000 on hand that is either 1% or 2% of annual income in savings. While I have sympathetic to a significant portion of the country ~20%-25% that cannot do that, I hard time believing 40% of Americans could not trim $500 off their expenses each year and save it.
