[gruez]

>The problem with what you said is that it's a statistic lumping all households together. As such it's largely meaningless because it lumps Elon's household with some person living in a trailer park in Montana. They are unlikely to have similar disposable income.

If a sibling comment[1] is to be believed, the "Southeast Asian backwater" in question seems to be Bangladesh. Looking at GDP per capita PPP (ie. adjusted for cost of living), united states is nearly 10x as rich. Is it possible to construct a hypothetical where a country has 10x higher GDP per capita than other, but the average citizen is poorer? Yes. Is that actually occurring? Unlikely.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42630667

>Nevertheless the point, as an anecdote stands. While America the country is rich, not all the people in it are. Indeed it seems to be increasingly split into rich and poor - the middle class is shrinking.

I don't know how you can possibly interpret the parent comment as just an "anecdote". It's specifically making claims about "the majority of middle-class Americans".