ABSTRACT
Rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, and the middle class in freefall. People go hungry so the few can live high on the hog. Poverty, inequality, and economic troubles are often exaggerated for political effect. Advocacy groups and various bureaucracies want us to think poverty is widespread and dire so that we'll support their programs. There is also an appetite for indignation and moral preening, to knock American society. Poverty is a relative term, and there is no comparison between the lives of today's low-income Americans and the genuinely poor throughout most of history. In many countries, a lot of people still survive on a dollar a day or less. Some Haitians eat literal mud-pies. The big economic story of modern America is not poverty or even middle-class stress; it is mass affluence. In America, and other developed nations, the dream of equality is actually being realized in the ways that really count.
