US poverty is vastly overstated. The most common measures of poverty are based on census data, but the census excludes the vast majority of redistributions from its calculation of income. It even excludes cash programs like "refundable tax credits".

We spend $1.3 trillion dollars per year on medicaid, HUD, Food Stamps, and refundable "tax credits" like the earned income credit and child tax credit. That's $32,500 of spending for each of the 40 million Americans who live "in poverty" (before including state-run programs and private charities like churches and food banks), meaning our welfare spending per "poor indvidual is higher than the median income for an EU household.

America's poor are doing just fine.