No, it is not false. You may not be aware of it, but massive poverty in the US is certainly there. Massive? Yes of course there is. There are so many people in

No, it is not false. You may not be aware of it, but massive poverty in the US is certainly there. Massive? Yes of course there is. There are so many people in the US living at or near the legal definition of the poverty line - it's clearly a major problem. A massive problem for sure. The number of homeless people in California alone is an international tragedy. The USA absolutely does have a massive poverty problem, and to deny this is to deny the reality and the humanity of your fellow citizens. Edit: I think it would be reasonable to suggest that if there were more than a million people living in the USA in poverty, that we could all agree that it would fall under a reasonable definition of "massive poverty", relative or otherwise. And I don't know the numbers, but I guarantee that there are well over a million people living in poverty in the USA. -------- Edit: I am banned from responding to comments on HN (too many downvotes? I'm not sure why. I've tried to be very polite here). Here is my reply to the comment below. > So you keep using hyperbolic statements - massive, massive, massive, massive - I am not the one who brought 'massive' to this conversation. I am using that word to respond as directly and clearly as possible to the commenters above. > and then you admit you have no idea what you're talking about, because you don't actually know any numbers involved. I did no such thing. I even took an educated guess at the numbers, which turned out to be conservative based on the numbers you supplied, and the number of poor people in the USA is 10x higher than I has estimated. Wow. > That's pretty ridiculous to put it mildly. I don't understand this at all. I'm not being ridiculous. That is rude. What do you mean by this? > The US poverty rate in 2016 was 12.7%. I would say that is very clearly massive poverty. It is completely unacceptable that a country as advanced and capable as the USA still has so much poverty. That's 40M people in poverty in the USA. Wow - that is a lot. Please be kinder, both to me and to them. Edit again: > The term "massive" is a strictly relative concept. No, it is not. I googled 'define:massive' just to check and was met with a set of reasonable definitions, all of which show that you are wrong. All of them. I like definition 2. "exceptionally large." 40M people, living in the USA in poverty, is exceptionally large. That is not up for debate. That number is huge. It is exceptional and it is large - an exception to what the USA is capable of doing, an exception to what people expect when they pay so much tax, an exception to what the media, government, and our society expect. Denying or diminishing the scope of the problems of poverty in the USA is harmful and insulting.