Ok, but you're not exactly a research sociologist, are you? It's not like you've made a study of poverty in America—let alone poverty on the imperial periphery, like El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras where we've been undermining democracy and labor rights in order to keep outsourced wages low. Now there are the places you can see real poverty that makes your Soviet austerity seem downright cosy.

So it's just not fair, your comparisons. You're not looking at the whole picture.