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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

> How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it?

The entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many?

Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries?

If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.

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> If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice?

The millions of folks traveling from all over the world to enter the US, often enough illegally, suggests that lots of people would choose the US.

There would be several other countries in Europe that would be better.

I agree with you but unfortunately beggars can't be choosers. America speaking English, strength of the USD, all contribute to making the US the most attractive (if not the only) option. When you're poor and just taking chances, you make the best of what you're presented.

I'm gonna ask you a question, and want you to answer very seriously. Do you think the homeless should be eating out of the trash? I have no problem with them having steak dinners.

... but I bet you will never answer for that. Beggars SHOULD BE CHOOSERS.

They are not planning to be poor, they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

This is disingenuous. People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar. It says nothing about their lives here vs in other places.

> This is disingenuous.

Don't impugn my motives.

> People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar.

That's not representative of the whole.

Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves.

Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.

I would predict with tighter security, those with families would be more likely to get caught (and thus recorded in the statistics). If you've ever travelled with a child, you'll understand what I mean. Whether that means the proportion that are families is greater or less is an open question. The model being used for illegal crossing right now has changed a bit, as we have an agreement with Mexico to immediately send them back while allowing (most?) others to claim asylum and not be sent back until seen by a judge. Mexican are more likely to have single men working crossing than most other latin nations, for example.

The effect is the cartels are dumping the families and "other than mexican" to intentionally get caught (they want to get caught to claim asylum. Legit asylum seekers go through the process and fakers just disappear after release), overwhelming the resources of the CBP, and then while CBP is overwhelmed the Mexicans and others like migrant workers cross the desert. Such action would seriously skew the statistics.

Well, I assumed that you're knowledgeable enough to know why people immigrate illegally to the US, so I went with disingenuous. If you don't know then misinformed is the better term.

>That's not representative of the whole.

I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.

Yes, and there's also the myths of what it's like to live in America

> If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice?

Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well.

I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people.

People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.

All of these stories are valid and probably true for the people that tell them. But I can't help but also recall the stories I read of people talking about being poor in the 3rd world, and it being so much less stressful because everyone else was poor and it wasn't seen as some failing but rather everyone was dealing with together.

Being at the bottom of the social pyramid, even if not poor, has its own problems. Circumstances obviously change from person to person and place to place but some individuals seem to react better to being the middle a country of poor than being poor-rich in a much rich country.

>many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.

can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand

Not the US, but anecdotally, I've heard the main cause of homelessness in Australia is not being poor. Generally there is some mental health component that prevents people from getting help. Yet more anecdotally, I'm 2 degrees away from a few people who have been homeless and it was fairly easy to get back on their feet.

But the comments on this are still pretty crazy and maybe miss the point. Even if the comparison isn't quite exact, wouldn't you expect the worlds richest country to do the best? Even the life expectancy is declining in the US. And even if COVID had an impact on life expectancy, again world's richest country.

Your parents moved here to give you a better life. They most likely sacrificed a way better life they could have led wherever you're from.

Only on Hacker News can you have an article detailing the systematic ways in which America holds people in poverty and have someone respond with a 30-year old anecdote about how great America is. Thanks for reminding me that 30% of this site is never, ever, ever going to grasp the concept of class consciousness.

Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation.

America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.

> Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States

Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade.

One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

The federal poverty level is roughly equal to the average income in Mexico or China in nominal terms.

Yes, the US is more expensive to live in than Mexico or China

The US is a very good place to be rich. If all the tiny expenses don’t bother you you can save a lot on the big ones.

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