alt Hacker News>You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning <$40k per year each.
Poverty in the US is similar to poverty in Sweden, according to this dataset:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...
But the median American earns far higher wages than the median Swede:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
I think there is just a lot of misinformation out there. Americans love to complain, and other countries love to criticize the US. These effects create systematic misconceptions which no one bothers to fact-check.
I mean the real unspeakeable secret is how the American mid-high-middle-class/upper-class has so effectively turned financially transparent despite being the wealthiest group in the country. The 65% to 99% are just an absolute hulking bag of cash.
The battle in the US is between the mid-low-middle-class/lower-class and the 1%. Which is just so incredibly effective at diverting attention from where all the actual money is. When you can pull your head out of the swamp of social media and fountains of clickbait/class ragebait, there is this huge elephant sitting in the room with it's finger over it's mouth doing the "shhh, be quiet" motion.