The United States, the world’s richest nation with economic output six times greater than China’s per person, faces a profound economic paradox. While China eliminated its extreme poverty of a billion people in three decades, the US now has over four million citizens subsisting on less than $3 a day—a three-fold increase since the 1980s.
This alarming situation reveals that America’s poverty problem is fundamentally a choice of policy. Despite world-leading innovation in technology and AI, the resulting prosperity has been deliberately funneled away from the working class due to political decisions like tax legislation, safety-net cuts, and trade tariffs that inflate consumer prices.
Income distribution data paints a grim picture: the poorest 10% of Americans now receive just 1.8% of total national income. This share is lower than what low-income groups receive in numerous developing nations, including Nigeria, China, and Bangladesh, highlighting the severity of politically engineered inequality in the US.