http://www.globalissues.org/article/4/poverty-around-the-world says:
We could surmise this to be for a number of rather obvious reasons. The take-away though is that the poor in wealthier countries are unhappier and find it harder to cope with poverty than the poors in less developed economies. If I live in
America and struggle to make ends meet while enjoying seemingly little luxury, well, what the hell is going on? I live in the richest country in the world! I work my ass off! Why am I forced to struggle so hard while my neighbor prospers and seems so content? Sure, if I lived in frigging Papua New Guinea and was dirt poor, well, so is pretty much everyone else. And I'm relatively unaware of what a first world lifestyle is actually like anyway so I probably can't relate or care much. At least I'm alive.
The wealth of the poor in America is not the point whatsoever. Anyone who argues otherwise clearly has no understanding of what being poor is actually like and has no interest in empathizing. Poverty is a trap - a cyclical problem that trains its victims to never escape its grasp. The relative wealth of the poor is transferred to the wealthy by a number of sly means regularly - there is never enough to save anything substantial for any lengthy period. They are taught to consume. You need to get every little comfort you can get while that money is available. That irresponsibility
keeps the cogs of the American consumer economy rotating, transferring money from the desperate and disillusioned to the owners. You cannot get ahead when you are trained to stay behind.
So, that's the real problem - inequality. From a study cited in the link earlier:
What bothers me about conservatives is that they seem to think that liberals want an "equal society." Some inequality is necessary to keep the cogs turning. The problem
right now is that that inequality is increasing exceptionally rapidly. It's provably bad for a society in so many ways! Do I want to earn as much as my bosses? No, I don't. I don't think most people would expect everyone to earn equally as much. After all, money is a motivator and more money should be given when warranted. What most of us do think is that the lower end should earn much more and the higher end should earn less. You need a good enough gap to "reward" those with more power to control the economy while still giving a great deal of disposable income to those who actually keep the economic cogs lubricated.
No, it doesn't have as much to do with the poor struggling to pay for their TV dinners as it does with the poor not being able to easily start their own ventures or buy even more products and services that are developed world luxuries.
We may wring our hands at the plight of the working poor to gain sympathy with regards to their basic, harder lives, but what we really think is that if we gave these guys a better income to start with that everyone else would do better as well.
Ham-fisted metaphor time!
The purpose of your lungs is to deliver oxygen to the red blood cells and then to the rest of your body to use as fuel. Which will help your body live longer and stay stronger - if the oxygen is ultimately all concentrated and delivered to a small portion of your cells or if it is distributed more or less equally as it traverses into every tiny capillary? Indeed, a great deal of it is needed to power the brain - but what good is a brain with a starved body? In fact, you'd have a serious illness in such a case. Sure, you don't
need the entire body to merely continue existing (or thriving in intellect or spirit, I admit), but you will be severely handicapped regardless.
I don't fancy continuing to drone on about this. Suffice it to say that the "richest poor" in America are still poor by American standards - and that's the only one that means anything in that context. Place an American poor person in Africa and they'd have enough money to be okay. But they don't live in Africa so it's a ridiculous, useless comparison.
