| > There are, give or take, 65 million people in France. (Incidentally, this number is also, give or take, the amount of Americans who live in the most abject poverty seen in the developed world.) Your claim about American poverty is beligerently false. The US poverty rate is below both the French [1] and Canadian [2] poverty rates. It's also below the rates of poverty in Spain and Italy. France also has a higher rate of homelessness than the US. There are 550,000 homeless in the US, that's a rate of 1.7 per 1,000. France has 140,000 homeless persons, a rate of 2 per 1,000. The French homelessness problem has been increasing dramatically (a 1/2 increase since 2001), while the US rate of homelessness has been persistently declining for decades. The French poverty rate is ~14%.[1] The US rate in 2016 was 12.7%, and will probably hit near or below 12% in 2018 at the rate it has been falling [3]. The rate of US poverty has seen a large improvement over the last 30 or so years (as one example, childhood poverty has been nearly cut in half since the early 1970s). It routinely goes unheralded, however government / welfare programs targeted at reducing poverty have been tremendously successful. [1] https://www.thelocal.fr/20160907/over-14-percent-of-the-fren... [2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/census-children-make-up-one-qu... [3] https://www.npr.org/2017/09/12/550492811/u-s-census-bureau-r... [3a] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-25... |
And in France, making less than 60% of median wage certainly doesn't make you rich, but you still get access to basic need (healthcare, even housing in some cases).
I'd rather be piss-poor in France than in the US.