[evmar]

You say "a problem in this country", but my point is that even the <=50k that literally half the US households make is itself a lot of money compared to the 25k earned in a "rich" country like Germany, and other countries are even poorer.

Universal healthcare in Germany likely helps offset the cost to some extent, but in the US those who even have healthcare usually get it through their employer. Really, it's more just a different expectation about what a reasonable life is.

I always think of how complex a television is, with thousands of little tiny components that had to be mined from the earth and forged and assembled and soldered (likely involving some child labor that we'd all prefer not to think about) and how many hundreds of people were involved. And then how it's just assumed in the US that it's reasonable to be able afford one of these in exchange for doing something simple like working a cash register at a bank for a few weeks, or how your quality of life somehow requires having multiple televisions etc.