[notahacker]

Conservatives will find it even easier to shrug off comparisons between the indebted, undereducated and underemployed in the US and the extreme poverty of the "Third World".

Whilst there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that relative poverty is actually more detrimental to people's happiness than absolute poverty, comparisons like this which conflate the issues and don't provide any stats to back their claims up are counterproductive.

I'm not saying extreme rhetoric doesn't work (see for instance effective campaigns which characterise a lifestyle more than half the world would consider well-off as a "living wage"), but I don't think it helps in this instance.