The 61% figure is real and comes from a survey, but it is a bit misleading. It is an aggregate- 21% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and struggle with paying their bills, and 40% live paycheck to paycheck but don't.
About half of the 61% save money from their paycheck too.
Among the 61% are some high earners that have high expenses, it isn't just poor people.
For example about half of people that make over $100k live paycheck to paycheck in the survey.
Anyways I'm continually horrified by how many Americans don't understand what median is. Financial and mathematical illiteracy is a problem that goes hand in hand here.
I'm not too surprised by all of this. The US isn't really a saver culture. And we don't really need to be with such a robust lending environment. Plus we tend to use housing as the main household asset vehicle.
But the 61% figure paints a rather misleading picture of financial precariousness among Americans in the context of everything.
There's some better surveys of this. The Fed does one called the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, which looks at stuff like how many people can pay cash/cash equivalent for an emergency expense. I think that's a better indicator of this sort of thing. There's lots of Americans in bad shape and/or with little savings, but I think the survey in the OP can be a bit obscuring