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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

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