What's with Americans constantly attempting to paint their situation as more dire than it actually is? Is it just a blatant lack of perspective on the rest of the world? Reminds me of an article I read attempting to claim that child mortality in Memphis was worse than in Bangladesh.

No, the United States isn't like the "developing world" if you're poor (and since when is Italy, the comparison country, considered "developing world"?)

Comparisons like these (which are rather frequent, I've found) are obnoxiously disrespectful to the millions of people actually living in developing world countries. The same millions who would give up their first kid (and often, in many ways, do) to be allowed into the US.

We can discuss improving the US while also still acknowledging that, on a global scale, their problems are fundamentally "first world problems". You don't need to spend hours crunching numbers finding some favourable metric to the South Sudan to make your damn point.