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Comment by proc0 | Hacker News Reader

Poor people in the U.S. are not really poor. This is the irony in the article and a lot of comments I see. You are acting out the same headline, but in perspective of real poverty.

Did you grow up in a town with dirt roads? Did your neighbors live in cardboard and aluminum self-made housing? Did your family struggle to eat and everyone around you is so skinny that fat people are a rare sight? These are some markers of being poor, and most "poor" people in the U.S. cannot imagine this life. People talking how they are poor because of their stock wealth... poor people won't even have this on their horizon.

Also, yes, my family was very poor in Latin America, and that is why I had no childhood and worked literally all my life, having little friends and romantic life. There are just not enough resources to even do what "poor" people in America take for granted.

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There are actually many, many communities in the United States where people live on dirt roads. That's super common. I grew up on a dirt road, and my parents still live on one. Much of the rural US lives off of paved roads.

With food and stuff, the thing is that in the US, you can very quickly go from having not much to having nothing. Many people do suffer from hunger and live on the edge because the cost of living in the United States relative to incomes can be very high. It's much more difficult to set up a small stall selling goods or food or something, and if you don't have proper permitting the police will shut you down. Therefore, once you get to a certain point you are really trapped. There's much less of an informal economy in the US than in Latin America, so people's ability to earn money is much more restricted and regulated.

The correlate to the people you are describing in the United States are referred to as the 'homeless.' They live in small structures made of cardboard and wood and tarps. Some have tents. The police will occasionally come by and throw all of their possessions in a garbage truck. Homelessness is pretty widespread, and the degree to which it exists here is often shocking to people from other countries.

Here's a photo essay that gives you some idea of what is going on in the United States in terms of the homeless. These living conditions are pretty darn comparable to international poverty. I assure you none of these people have stocks.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-08/homeless...

Obviously the scale of the whole thing is different between the US and Latin America, but there's lots of pretty shocking poverty in the US.

> The correlate to the people you are describing in the United States are referred to as the 'homeless.'

It really isn't, and I'm assuming you have never been to Brasil, Bolivia, Peru (Venezuela is out of the question for travelers, but also another example), not to mention Central America and parts of Mexico, I'm sure.

We're talking about inter-generational poverty. People having absolutely no knowledge of what it's like to live a normal life. Poverty that takes you back in time. Some of these places don't have running water or electricity (in fact, no electricity isn't even a big deal in these areas, people are used to it).

Also the dirt roads I mention isn't some rural countryside. I'm talking about poor towns and cities, that have no resources to pave the roads. I still remember TV ads with politicians constantly promising to pave those heavily used roads, but of course it's rampant with corruption.

I think anyone who has not travelled outside of a developed nation, like the US or the UK, probably cannot imagine what people in poor countries consider their every day reality. The contrast is stark, and I'll repeat as many times as necessary, poor people in the US are not really poor. I guess some of them just take their developed nation for granted.

I was just responding to your assertion that poverty doesn't really exist in the United States. It's not as widespread as in Latin America, and tends to be more sporadic, but there are hundreds of thousands of people living in tents and improvised shelters with no access to running water or electricity and no hope for the future here. The United States is no more a homogeneous bloc of wealth and prosperity than Latin America is a continuous favela of poverty.

I read your core argument in this post to be that the form of poverty you describe is much more widespread in Latin America than in the United States. I'd be a fool to disagree with you on that. Yes, you're right.

I'm certainly not trying to win a pity contest and say that the United States is a horrible place where everything sucks. That would be absurd. But for many people, the United States is a much shittier place than you make it out to be.

As for the challenges of these places, they are daunting indeed. The United States is about as toxic a neighbor as one could ask for. Sending money and guns South, and bringing drugs North. Mounting coups. Stealing the best and the brightest from countries that desperately need that human capital. Putting children fleeing violence and poverty in cages. None of it should sit right with someone who has a modicum of conscience. But, as you have seen from our recent political battles, we barely know what to do to fix ourselves, let-alone help our neighbors. Our country is grappling with it's own reckoning as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Our Gini is 0.48 and growing. Mexico's is 0.5. With every passing year the homeless encampments get larger.

Perhaps the time will come when the fortunes are reversed?

It wasn't my intention to be lecturing, sorry. My point was around the perception of what poor is, given the article. Rich people can't understand poor people in the US, and I'm pointing out this happens on every level at the global scale. It's easy to lose perspective and think that because you're in a tent in SF or Seattle, that means you know the extent of what it means to be poor, when in fact they have some resources, help, and opportunities.

This is visible when you compare and contrast those immigrants that cross the border with the homeless population. Of course not all homeless people are the same, but I believe the contrast is clear, immigrants have a hard time getting here but when they do they still work as hard as they can, and from my experience they are more than happy doing so. Their previous situation was so bad, they are happy to be cleaning, farming, gardening etc., because it's so much better than where they came from in Latin America. This attitude difference is directly coming from their perspective of poverty.

It's all good food for thought.

There are plenty of people around Seattle that are living in cardboard and aluminum self made housing.

And were they born into it? Maybe now Seattle will catch up to Latin America, but I was talking about poverty that spans across generations. People who don't even know it's possible to have a different life, and therefore when you meet them they're not in a bad mood, they accept their reality and live their life as if that's all there is, except so many places still lack basic needs like running water and electricity.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all in the U.S., but there's no comparison. Even the worse parts of the developed world still have access to many resources that some people in poor countries will never have access to in their lifetimes.

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