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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

Texas has literal shanty towns with 100,000 American citizens living there so I think this is a situation where statistics (or the ones presented) are highly inaccurate or deeply mischaracterized:

https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+colonias&sxsrf=ACYBGNT...

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The Texas colonias are inhabited by people who crossed into the US from Mexico. There are many Americans citizens there because everyone born in the US is automatically a citizen. But their standard of living says nothing about the accuracy of the statistics addressing the standard of living at the 20th percentile. (That’s 60 million people from the bottom.)

That’s not to say we shouldn’t “do something” about their living condition, just that your post is a non-sequitor. When Sweden accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees, the median income of the country almost certainly went down. But that doesn’t mean everyone became poorer.

The post I am replying to claims that the "20% poorest" in the US have it better than middle-class Europeans which is such a ludicrous claim as to require posts like mine to provide the context of reality.

To your stuff about Sweden and refugees, income and wealth are related but separate concepts.

For some perspective Bulgaria, an EU member state, has a population of 7 million and an average salary of around $700 per month, or $8,400 per year. That would put you way below the poverty line in the USA.

Minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour. A full-time minimum wage worker in Texas can surpass the average Bulgarian's monthly wage in under 2.5 weeks.

And that's just the average wage. More than half of the 7 million residents live below that. For every cherry picked colony in Texas, there's several even poorer villages in the post-Soviet states to cancel it out.

That is in pure $$. According to wikipedia, the PPP according is $24,485. There is 80-90% house ownership. Income tax is 10%. It's hard to make a reasonable comparison like that.

Another example is Czech Republic, which has the lowest poverty rate in EU - under 10% before Finland and Netherlands. And yet it's way after them in the wealth list.

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