All of these numbers are ridiculously high. I could afford not to die even when I was earning half of what they say the minimum is for my area. I suspect that this is politically motivated (e.g. they highlight all the jobs they don't think pay enough -- but they don't highlight all the expenses they could argue are too high).
The phrase "living wage" is loaded to start with. I'm sure there are political motivations here.
However, when I ran their calculations for my town, I was surprised to get a number very close to what we had already figured out as our minimum "comfortable" budget. No, we wouldn't die on less money, but the cuts would have to come someplace painful, like dropping health insurance for me and my wife, or eating a lot more potatoes and a lot less meat and vegetables.
If you wanted to rephrase the concept to "minimum stable middle class income", they were right on, at least in our case.
