How the CBO defines "income": Labor income
includes cash wages and salaries, including amounts allocated by employees to 401(k) plans; employer-paid health
insurance premiums; the employer’s share of payroll taxes
for Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment
insurance; and the share of corporate income taxes borne
by workers (see Box 1)." [1]

I see how bad the problem is, when we can't even agree what 'income' means. I've been mainly self-employed the last 5 years, and had years of near-$0 income, and other years, better, where I was also paying other employee W-2s and 1099s. Before that, I was W-2 from $50k up to one particularly good year where I max'd out FICA. I've also seen the process of applying for SSDI, SSI, Medi-Cal, food stamps, the whole gambit.

Call me wrong, but please do me the favor of doing the math for yourself and let us follow along with your examples. I thought the $24k - $30k example was a great one. It's the reality for many Americans. I though the $100k example was also fairly straight-forward, minus the FICA confusion.

I don't quite get why companies tend to hide all the payroll costs associated with a W-2 plus full benefits. If cost of an employee is $140k line item on the income statement, I tend to want them to know that, even if it's not all showing up in the direct deposit or on the paystub.

I know exactly how much $0 deductible group health insurance costs in my zip code by age, and I know you can get that all for free by not working. Economically that is income you have to earn (value you have to create for the company) to make up for that loss of benefits. It doesn't come from the magical W-2 benefits fairy. All that money would be actual real income if you didn't lose your guaranteed free Medi-Cal (the best insurance money can't buy) by simply deciding to work full time.

A rigorous financial analysis must count the totality of lost and forfeit benefits. I understand the inclination to bury one's head in the sand to avoid the realization that it's almost literally all-for-nothing but the enjoyment of doing good work. Once you actually get your head above water at around $100k+ of GROSS household income, and you actually see a little bit of real free cash flow, things improve rapidly. Up to that point, it's economically, almost entirely treadmill.

The only reason to keep going is building experience and hopefully getting a raise till you finally crawl out of the hole. It's not too bad in the programming field, even a single breadwinner can get the family there, but statistically, most people will never emerge from the social welfare pit.

[1]... "In its analyses of the distribution of income and taxes, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) strives to measure income as broadly as possible and thus includes in income some items that people may not usually consider to be part of income. For example, CBO counts taxes paid by businesses as part of household before-tax income; because those taxes are ultimately borne by households in the form of reduced income, CBO adds them to before-tax income in order to measure more accurately what a household’s ability
to consume would have been in the absence of those taxes."

[2] CBO intentionally broke it's measure of government transfers after ACA, in their latest report, [because it just looked too bad otherwise] (emphasis added): "CBO recently undertook a more comprehensive analysis of the distribution of federal spending in 2006. Although that study used a similar methodology to the one used in this report, it differed in some important respects, most notably by adjusting the amount of transfer income reported in survey data to match the budgetary totals reported in the Treasury Department’s Monthly Treasury Statements. The data used in this report are not aligned to budgetary totals and, because of underreporting of transfer income in surveys, do not capture the full effects of government transfers on household income."