A 2 percent chance of falling into poverty

I had mentioned before finding and then immediately losing track of source data that bore out a contention I had heard my father advance when I was young: "If you graduate highschool, get married and stay married, and get a job and keep a job, any job, you won't be poor." I have now come across, not the original data but the reported work of a researcher that has done that analysis. From Family Matters by Ron Haskins:

In our recently published book Creating an Opportunity Society, my Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill and I analyze data from the Census Bureau to show that if young people finish high school, get a job, and get married before they have children, they have about a 2 percent chance of falling into poverty and nearly a 75 percent chance of joining the middle class by earning $50,000 or more per year.