Fred-Rick
2 min readJan 30, 2022

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The definition of poverty in the United States is a self-created definition.

Globally, the definition of poverty is 50% of what the person in the middle of society makes. Fifty percent of the median.

In the EU, this does not capture much poverty, so they upped it to 60% of the median. That way, they capture more people.

When expressing the US poverty definition via the median, then we have about 40% of the median income establishing our definition. That means a lot of people are not counted in.

If we were to use the EU definition of poverty, then one in three Statelings would be living in poverty.

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Conclusion: if we look in the mirror too much and mostly see ourselves, and when comparing ourselves to others and only use our own home-made definitions, then we get an inflated self image.

Don't forget that the US prints dollars and that many nations in the world are using dollars. Those are dollars we can spend and we do not have to worry about because others are taking the dollars. It does not weaken the dollar when we print more.

If the Middle-East decided to not trade oil in dollars anymore, then those dollars would come home and make the dollar lose a whole lot of value. With a dollar expressed like a currency of a normal nation (i.e. not a global dominating currency), then all your figures would not be correct anymore.

So, tone down the rhetoric because we live in an inflated financial reality that one day will be gone. You are also not making friends by claiming to be the best, but you sure are making people dislike our otherwise beautiful nation. Be a bit humble, recognize that we often compete for the sake of competition and that if the whole world would do what we are doing that we then need ten planets in fuels and resources. We are not friendly to our planet.

We also have a two-party democracy, which means we are not the freest nation in the world. We can vote for red and for blue, but an individual cannot vote for green, yellow and orange and actually get them to represent us. We're not a dictatorship, but we also do not live in a nation with full political freedom because of the limited expression of our political ideals.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.10

Scroll down the list to see that the bottom 10% in our nation gets 1.7% of all there is. Compare it to other nations in the developed world. It is a reality that our bottom ten percent could live in many third world nations and still have the same lives, nothing better, nothing worse.

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Fred-Rick
Fred-Rick

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