To people who say poverty doesn't exist in America

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About a third of Americans make less than $15,000 a year; 40 percent make less than $20K a year. And many of those who make more than that live in expensive states like California, Massachusetts and New York so this is really an undercount of the poor in America.

While $15,000 a year might sound rich by world standards, keep in mind that a one bedroom apartment in the US costs about $8,000 a year alone, medical care is very expensive being private (though Obamacare is helping), and cars are a necessity in most areas and aren't cheap.

This basically means that roughly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, on as little as $5-$10 a day ($1,500-$3,000 a year) or less after rent and utilities are paid.

Some facts:

22% of American homes lack central AC and 13% lack AC of any kind
1/3 of homes lack a dishwasher
18% of homes lack a washing machine
13% of Americans have no medical insurance
76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck with minimal savings
20% of American children are considered to live in poverty
20% of Americans say they can't always afford the food they need
Nearly a million American children went hungry at some point in 2012


I think we have serious issues in this country.

I make less than that and I have an awesome life.

Those numbers are actually low but the 76% is pretty high and yeah that is pretty normal. My family lived that way too but yet I wonder how they afforded to buy us new clothes and shoes and stuff for our school. You have to have extra money left over after paying all the bills including gas and food and I assume that includes our school lunches.

Who says poverty doesn't exist in America?

I've never met such a person.

America is losing wealth creating jobs in manufacturing and research, and massively growing in low wage service work. Part time work is growing too, probably thanks to Obamacare, so employers don't have to pay for employee health care.

In my state, Ford Automobile company moved their design/research center to India, because in India they have an abundance of English speaking educated people who will work for much lower (e.g., a person with a PHD in computer science earns ~4,000-5,000 USD per year).
http://www.naukrihub.com/salary-in-indi ... alary.html

"America lost 5.7 million, or 33%, of its manufacturing jobs in the 2000s"
http://www.industryweek.com/the-2000s

It eventually has to get much, much worse for Americans, because our standard of living is based on borrowing money that we never intend to repay. Someday that game will end.

The problem isn't necessarily that America's standard of living is going down, but that Americans have been conditioned to expect a first world standard of living as a birthright. People need to learn to live with less.

The big problem is, America's infrastructure is built around an expectation of first world living standards. In most places, it is illegal to plant food bearing plants in your yard, you can't get by without a car, your house is designed to be heated and cooled with electricity or oil, and is filled with an endless supply of stuff that requires electricity to operate.

In 1910 there were maybe one or two electrical outlets per room, and houses had two bedrooms and one bathroom. Today houses have five or six bedrooms and five baths, plus "media rooms" and "game rooms" and so on, and they have big screen HDTVs in every room and everybody has computers and smartphones, and so on.

To put that in perspective, the 1920s-era mansion of industrial baron Henry Kaiser had four bedrooms and four baths. And that was considered grossly excessive by many. And Kaiser's house had landline telephones and maybe had two or three radios (no TVs yet). His car was a stick shift. (Automatic transmissions weren't invented until 1937 or so.)

What will happen when we no longer have cheap oil? We will have to shovel the bodies off the streets like in The Purge.

That's pretty much it.

People want more and more and more; if they don't have it, they become depressed, irate and/or a number of other things (realize that the wealthy celebs and whatnot aren't real people -- they're very far from the majority). They're envious of others. These are pathetic emotions.

You can live healthy and happily on what us in the West call "poverty".

Value poverty.

Being poor in america is not that bad of a thing. Even in poverty, you will live better than most kings in human history! Of course, poverty exist in american; however, with the logic I used above it is easily to come up with that poverty doesn't exist.

I don't have media or game rooms in my house and no HDTV in every room, we finally got a rather cheap one for the living room and I'd like to get one or at least a flat screen so I can hook it up to my laptop but it will take a bit of saving up. Aside from that 2 actual bedrooms and a couple basement rooms(would not pass legal standards as being bedrooms or something like that but I have one as my room regardless) there are 4 bathrooms but plenty of problems as far as infastructure of the house and its foundation. Aside from that its my moms house i live there paying rent with almost half my SSI money and have been cut off food stamps so much of the time have a hard time getting enough to eat, I don't get a sufficient share of the food my mom and her boyfriend buy.

Computers and phones are sort of important to have anymore, I do not really think owning a lap-top or phone really implies excessive wealth, they are things some people save up for due to the practical purposes they serve...I do not think the problem is people expecting too much necessarily. Seems like more often than not its people that are more well off that complain about needing more material crap than people with less or will complain about things such as maybe owning one car as opposed to three when people like me cannot even afford a car and struggle to afford adequate bus/light-rail transportation.

The uber wealthy with more wealth to last them 5 life times need to learn to live with less, so the less of us don't have to fight over scraps and have a bunch of class division because supposedly its the poor taking everything from the middle class when it's the ones with the highest concentrate of wealth screwing everyone else over(not saying everyone who could be considered wealthy is contributing to the issue, but in general they are the ones behaving like pigs)

Last edited by Sweetleaf on 19 Dec 2014, 2:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

Not so sure that is true, did most of them struggle to feed themselves? if so then perhaps that is the case but doubting it at the moment.

Is that the percentage of homes that need it or does it include places like Alaska, Washington, Rhode Island and Wyoming where circumstances rarely call for it?

Btw, quite a ridiculously high number of people have AC if that is the case. Almost no one has AC in the Netherlands, but that's because it's almost never that warm anyway.

Indeed, that caught my eye, too. Remarkable.

Okay, to address a few points here:

About air conditioning, North American is farther south than most/all of Europe (look at a globe). I can tell you from personal experience, even in the upper mid-west summers are extremely hot and AC is essential for people with health issues, and the aged.

I seem to remember that there was an extremely hot summer in Europe a year or two ago and people died because they did not have AC.

In much of the US every summer is extremely hot and people die, not because there's no AC to be had, but because they cannot afford access to AC. It is VERY common to hear about old people dieing in Chicago (upper mid-west city) because they couldn't afford to run their air conditioners or didn't have AC.

The general poverty issue is a bit more complex... The most alarming stat concerns children. That, 25% of US children grow up in impoverished food insecure homes is a disgrace. Again, this is not because of any sort of scarcity, this is because of lack of ECONOMIC ACCESS.

Malnourished, neglected children (these traits are linked statistically) grow up to be dysfunctional, unproductive adults. This is nothing more than short sighted, greedy, capitalist America eating its young. We are sowing the wind here and the first fruits of this bitter harvest can be seen in places like Ferguson Missouri...

Which brings up the real issue. In American, it is not so much a case of absolute poverty as it is a case of economic inequality. You can call it class envy if you like, but you minimize and dismiss it at your own peril (if you live in the states).

Vastly unequal societies are not healthy or stable over the long haul, and when they change, it's usually violent and destructive--Just look at the French and Russian revolutions, or many of the ongoing Arab spring revolutions.

American has avoided violence mostly with limited reforms such as the Square Deal/Progressive reforms of the early 20th century, the New Deal in the 30s, the Great Society/Civil Rights reforms of the 60s and so on... In the past, American plutocrats have been smart enough to give up just enough to keep the rabble happy. It remains to be seen if the current generation is smart enough to recognize the necessity of doing this. I'm not confident that they are.

At any rate, something's got to give. At last count there were 47 million (mostly working people) on food stamps. That's simply not sustainable or healthy from a political or economic point of view. It cannot last.

This cartoon does a great job of explaining were we went wrong. If we don't find our own way back to a more functional, equitable society... it won't be pretty.

Last edited by GoonSquad on 19 Dec 2014, 12:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sweetleaf, I was thinking more of newly built houses, like those in my area. They are set up for maximum conspicuous consumption. I saw a house for sale that had HDTV in every room, even the bathrooms, and the bathrooms had an expensive shower system installed, cost about $9000. The house had very expensive pots and pans hanging from a rack in the kitchen as if they were a work of art. It was sickening. It sounds like you live in poverty.

I have never heard anyone make this claim. Do you have some examples you can share?