There's just a lot of inequality in the US that is both socially and politically unacceptable in the rest of the developed world. Extremes are more accepted here.

There are more extremely rich people than you would see in other Western countries and and many, many more extremely poor people than in other Western countries. Alleviating that would mean implementing policies to redistribute wealth that many Americans are not willing to implement, especially conservatives.

The US basically sacrifices the good of the many for the great of the few.

1 in 8 lives in poverty (<20k for a 2 person household).

1 in 4 has less than 1k in savings.

1 in 2 has less money saved than last year.

1 in 2 is living paycheck to paycheck

But thanks to massive income inequality, the average American makes 59k a year.

Honestly was shocked when I first visited. On TV the streets are wide there and everyone has enough to eat.

Visit (and at this point I have spent time in about half their states) and it is a different story. Broken roads in disrepair. Beggars everywhere, fighting for the chance to ask you for food, water, anything. We stopped at traffic lights and a teenage boy shaking with palsy knocked on our windows begging for food. People mobbed me in one city because I was carrying a bag of apples and they hoped for one as my bag split. I was careful never to give, but was still followed everywhere as an obvious tourist. The only place I did not get food begging on every single streetcorner was Manhattan. I am told this is because they deported beggars to the mainland there. Heartless sods in a capital that gets snow told me "there's less beggars in winter, the cold gets them".

I think you're right about the jobs, too. There were roadworkers on those broken roads, using jackhammers without ear protection, or even foot protection. I was told it was because they are "free" to bring their own PPE. They looked injured and sick but determined.

Shops were similar. Waitstaff looked half starved, serving the rich in an obsequious yet hateful way unnervingly like a roleplaying slave. It was disgusting, and ruined many a meal by constant disingenious artificial attention.

You won't regret visiting, but it is a ridiculously heartless broken place. The most expensive travel insurance too, for reasons most obvious in their medical stories.

Yanks are no doubt going to downvote this to oblivion, but it is how I have so far experienced their miserable cities.

Americans are told by the media that they are living "the good life" and that they shouldn't bother looking at conditions elsewhere. USA!USA!USA!

Is it that bad here? Well, to answer your question let me just say that, in America, your very life might depend on keeping your boss happy. Many people live in places where there aren’t many options for jobs, and our healthcare is tied to our employment. If those people lose said job, they might not be able to afford lifesaving medications that they need. Often, those people are too poor to afford moving somewhere with better opportunities. I’m lucky enough to live in a city large enough to provide plenty of opportunity for employment, but I do currently work just four blocks away from the bridge I lived under as a child one winter, because I was thrown out by the Gospel Mission for skipping the morning sermon and prayers one day.

The American economy is built in a very specific way to make certain things cheap and certain things very expensive. The cheap things are gas, toys, commodities, clothes, unhealthy food. The expensive things are education, good food, healthcare, and, in certain areas, housing. That means there are a ton of Americans who live extremely precarious lives, where losing their job would be the end, but they still have a higher level of material comfort than many people would in other countries.

The other thing about the American economy is that wealth is extremely biased towards older people. For a long time, the system was built around normal working class people buying a house, and building wealth through that. As long as housing prices went up at a controlled rate, everybody slowly got richer. Now, older people own most of the houses. Like I grew up in a small town that was sort of the ideal American dream neighborhood. There were a bunch of other kids on my street, including some good friends. We rode the bus together and spent the weekends hanging out in my friend's loft. Now, when I go back there, there's like one family with kids on the street, and everyone else is a retired couple in a huge house that they don't really need. They have no particular incentive to move out, because it would be expensive and they're comfortable.

So if you're a younger person without in-demand education you really are extremely poor. 5k could really improve your quality of life by letting you get some dental work or something. Although the unemployment rate is low right now, companies are able to collude to some degree to keep entry level jobs precarious.

Disability (which I paid taxes for, to protect me from poverty if I became disabled) pays a whopping $914/MONTH.

I sell nudes to afford basic necessities.

They also have an asset cap of $2,000 which hasn't changed since 1974. Basically, if I have more than $2k in my bank (or in any valuables like comics or coins) at any time, they take away my food and Medical insurance. If adjusted for inflation, it would be $13k. I'm drowning and lucky I'm an attractive girl, otherwise I couldn't afford to survive.

The main problem we have here is the difference between mean and median income. The average (mean) is fine but not many actually make that. There's a majority who are sort of poor or very poor, a smaller slice who are average and that's reasonably well off (not in immediate danger of something dire happening) and a minority who are so fucking rich it skews the average.

All of this is exacerbated by the lack of social safety net here, we simply don't do as much redistribution in the correct direction as most rich countries. So it's harder to be poor here because they are preyed on rather than supported. In those shows you watched, you are correct, the stickiness of capital in the upper classes is the problem, not an overall lack of money.

It's just not spread out right. Yes more should unionize and also we need more small to medium size businesses, more growth at the bottom to pull that money back and spread it out better.

Consider me as a data point. My salary is in the low six figures. I have a reasonable mortgage and car loan. I also live paycheck to paycheck and have trouble paying my bills every month. I am currently in default on several thousand dollars of medical debt, that I am trying to pay off gradually, but I'm not always keeping ahead of my new medical debt.

Part of my income goes to helping out some relatives and friends who are in much worse shape, but even without that, I would have trouble breaking even.

I am just barely short of being in the top 10% of US incomes. The income inequality in this country has left the vast majority of the population struggling. Many can no longer afford enough food or housing.

Well when most employers can fire you at any time for almost any reason (at-will employment) and your healthcare is tied to your job then.... yeah, employers can treat their employees pretty poorly and get away with it, especially if you work in something like fast food or big box retail where plenty of young, unskilled workers are entering the workforce every year that they can replace you with.

You know it's pretty obvious that inequality is rampent in the US and people are hurting because of it. Yet the latest polls show just how popular Donald Trump and the Republicans are. Conservatives use to try and hide their true intentions, but today they dont care and will say exactly how much they want Americans to hate other people in the country. I truly wish I could understand why an average Americans doesnt see how much the Democrats have done under the Biden administration to try and fix these issues. I really do believe if the Democrats could finally have control of the federal government, and I mean 2008 levels, we could see some serious change.

Tl;Dr: It varies very drastically by locale. Rural Americans can often live okay on "very* minimal income. Standards on what " poor" and "normal" vary about as widely between parts of America as they do between America and where you're from.

Where I live (Dallas), I'm making around $40,000 in an area where the median is $60,000. I live alone, but I will have to buy a new car this year and I will barely be able to make my payments. I do not have a college degree, and I'm still basically entry level.

I've been looking at moving a lot recently. If I moved where I want to live (Oregon), I'd probably make the same or slightly less money, and my rent and expenses would probably rise by a few hundred a month. In effect, I would barely be getting by if I didn't have a car payment.

I've also been looking at Chicago, where the median wage is slightly less than I make now, but cost of living is slightly lower, and I'd make slightly more. I also wouldn't have to have a car, so my disposable income would rise drastically.

Isn't the median income like $35k/year? A $5k tip would then be at least a month and a half's salary for half the workers in the country. That's pretty significant and a good reason to be stoked. Considering that Americans pay out of pocket what is normally covered by taxes (on top of taxes), yes, I would say that they really are that poor. That's part of the system though, because as long as workers are tired and in poverty they'll never have the time and energy, or take the risk of missing even a minute of work, to organize.

Don't confuse the difficulty of unionization with the lack of need/want. Most states are "at will", which means they can pretty much fire you for whatever, whenever. Couple that with low wages and poor social programs, and you have a vast amount of workers who can't afford to go on strike.

However, many of us are living comfortably, with decent wages, insurance, and paid time off. Folks from other places really tend to forget how many people are here, and just how varied the situations can be. It's not dire for many of us, but if you're on the bottom, the struggle is nearly insurmountable. Which, unfortunately, is by design. We're working on it though, just don't equate tv shows to an accurate depiction of a country of 300 million.

It really depends on where you look. In rural areas of red states (states in which the majority of elected officials are members of the Republican party), things are pretty bad. Red states tend to have fewer (read: almost no) social programs.

I have a bit of a unique perspective on the dichotomy, because one side of my family is firmly in the lower class and the other firmly in upper middle.

There's a big difference for the two. It's like two different countries. For the lower class, what you've described is indeed normal. And many in the other classes would not believe that it is that bad for them.

You're considered "well-off" if you can manage to become a wage slave, which is where 100% of your income goes to your bills.

I would guess America is so wildly diverse, like most countries, that there's no real "Average American". Sure, median income isn't great and recent inflation has screwed with poorer people all the way through to probably upper middle class.

However, I don't think there's "one reason" for people being / feeling poor. It also depends on what you mean by "life changing".

Anyway - I'd say there's are very poor people. Some of this is generational poverty, some of it is no family support, some of it is addiction, some of it is mental illness, some of it is bad choices. A social safety net would really help here. For whatever reason the US is against much of one.

There's working poor, where supposedly the value they bring to a company isn't sufficient to pay a living wage. I guess elsewhere this is government forced to be a higher minimum wage way more than in the US. This I think is also leading to lots of apathy now in service workers, which means atrocious service at most places, which is finally starting to impact people higher up the income chain. Though it's usually scoffing that no one is doing a good job anymore.

Middle class people get squeezed by inflation a LOT, and children are incredibly expensive. As you get into middle middle and upper middle classes there's also the spending problems. This is either driven by lack of or failures of public options, so people are paying for home schooling / private schooling, paying ever more out of pocket to get access to medical care at ever higher rates, and really any service needed can be astronomical or else often worse than doing nothing unless you know a guy. There's also all the credit card debt that with higher interest rates are squeezing people even more. Some of this is unnecessary spending running out of control, but some of it is lack of wages keeping up with inflation mixed with many things having way more ongoing costs than they used to. Either they have planned obsolesce (Back in the 90s no one had to buy a new landline phone, or wireless phone every 2 years), they have subscriptions (again, in the 90s you bought a car or a radio, you bought a computer, you bought a game, whatever - it lasted with no ongoing payments), and many things just don't last at all. Then there's the interest in experiences - which is a transient thing, so you're always paying for a new one. I'd also say there's a huge burden on everyone related to college - and it is getting less obvious by the year if that hit in loan payments "forever" is worth the supposed economic boost. My parents grew up when college was like $8,000 max for 4 years and room etc - you could work your way through it, and the boost to lifetime expected earnings was pretty easy to overshadow the effort or loan if any needed. I might have been the last generation to get through with $20k in debt from 4 years, which while I'm still paying on isn't enough to overshadow the earning benefits. Today (and for the last 15 years or more) it's more and more for a 4 year degree, while the expected positions aren't going up in pay very much at all. But if you do go to college that's going to hit you and your parents for a long time also.

As you get to upper middle and upper class - upper middle is scared shitless by the inflation, wage increase demands, etc that might cause them to fall out of that class, so they can feel "poor" even though they're far from it.

TL;DR: there are a lot of poor Americans, and many who are "doing OK" either drowning in debt or just feeling insecure even if not technically poor.

I’m an American and I had a pretty decent job out of college and the idea of moving out of my parents house without roommates was impossible. In fact I don’t know a single person who did it.

$5000 might not be life changing for me, but it would take me a really long time to save that much.

Americans have high salaries compared to the rest of the world, but everything is really expensive so things kind of balance out.

One thing to consider is that the higher salaries make it easier to get things like an iPhone or MacBook. But all the things that are needs like housing, food, and a car are almost too expensive to afford.

Most people have a car loan, most people don’t even dream of owning a home any longer. When you see that you will never earn enough for a home, then you don’t really save for it.

When the amount you earn that. An be saved is too little then you don’t really bother with it.

Most Americans do not live nearly as well as it is portrayed on TV or in movies.

update

I’ll add on to this that most Americans have debt for some reason or another besides having a car and house. A lot of people have student debts that are oppressive some people have medical debt as well.

Gas prices are reasonably low, but everything is so far that you end up using a decent amount of gas to get around.

When I moved from the UK to the US I left a fairly nice job paying £30k a year (this was back in the 2000s) and had to start again from the bottom. I earned $6 an hour, and my then bf and I sublet an apartment for $600 p/m (he was on a grad school salary that worked out to $9 an hour). We bought discount food items and everything was thrifted, we didn't save anything, and we went nowhere and did nothing. I have a memory of us buying a sandwich from the gas station as a treat and making it last all weekend (tbf it was like a footlong sub).

Fast forward to now, we have a combined income that puts us in the top 10% of the country. We own a house, luckily got in before prices went insane, so our mortgage is actually less than our sublet was (adjusted for inflation). We still thrift and buy reduced meats from the supermarket, we travel more but because our jobs pay for it, we do eat out a lot more but I still cook most weeknights.

We're better off now by a long shot, but we're still careful with our money, and have crafted some neat tricks to make sure we don't spend beyond our means. If we bought all the new clothes, groceries, cars, and vacations like the movies suggest is normal for a middle class couple, we'd go broke quickly. Also, having zero kids helps massively.

Sometimes I look at what we've achieved and what our net income is, and it's wild to me that people survive on less. Sure, we enjoy things now vs. sticking to essentials at all times, but it's wild that people are expected to live an entire life just getting by on the basics. What's the point of having community, taxes, and law if you still live paycheck to paycheck, surviving just to work and sleep?

When I was poor, $5k would've been life changing. I wouldn't have eaten any better except for a day or two, but I wouldn't have had debts hanging over my head.

Matter of fact, I had a $4k debt hanging over my head for like 6 years because I dropped out of college. I couldn't pay it off until I got my dad's life insurance after he died. I worked the entire time, 6 years straight, but was underpaid and Wells Fargo was doing its illegal overdraft fee thing....I will never work with that bank again. It wasn't uncommon for me to pay $70 in fees on a paycheck of $400. Idk how the fuck I survived.

That's really hard to gauge.

I drive a cab. I definitely fall into the category of people whose lives could be significantly upgraded for $5k. Some of the people I drive around are so much better off financially than me that that concept isn't something that would ever even occur to them, while some of them are in much tougher positions. For where I am financially, I'm pretty lucky. I've got cheap rent that hasn't gone up in over a decade and a reliable vehicle that I didn't have to pay for. If things go bad I have family that can help a bit, but at the moment I operate on very little. I know people who bring in more but have way more going out and have to make huge sacrifices because of it.

But like, the majority of the people I pick up really don't have it easy. Most don't have vehicles, so that's a pretty big filter in the direction of poverty in the US, but that financial category is very much built into and intended by the system and people seem to be totally fine with it. I can only assume that's the case, given that we have suburban neighborhoods full of people with enough throw-away money to completely elevate nearby destitute neighborhoods but it doesn't happen. And this is in Massachusetts, where we have some half-decent social services.

But, like, it's bad. Look at it this way. The next time you go run some errands, try to pay attention to the people who are ringing you up, getting your food, all of that. Think of the sheer quantity of people working in positions that you interact with every single day in service jobs. For the most part, all of them are making no more than a few dollars above minimum wage. Most are probably within 2 dollars of it.

Wherever the average American's at financially, there's a lot more that those who are well off could be doing to make it better. Like, maybe instead of new marble countertops, give someone that life transforming $5k. Because it is absolutely the morally correct move.