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America isn't poor. America is expensive. At minimum wage, you're already richer than the median individual in a European country.
Poverty is easier to eradicate than many other social-ills, because poverty is tangible. Food, shelter, and clothing.
At face value, costs for all 3 are relatively consistent across economies with different purchasing powers. The US as fairly cheap groceries1 for a developed economy) and fast fashion costs the same around the world.
Shelter too is cheap. The US has the most abundant land and houses can be purchased pre-assembled from home-depot to mitigate labor costs.
Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.
Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.
Don't run away from the uncomfortable single group to blame for this. Let's stop caring about 'landlords AND'. Instead let's focus on the landlords themselves. Some landlords are also middle-class salary-men and sometimes they are an investment company like Blackrock, but their secondary identity is irrelevant. When they are a landlord, they are all the same. Landlords the worst kind of burden on the economy. They get paid for hoarding and running what's effectively an extortion racket by limiting where you can build in this country : "pay me whatever I charge, or go homeless. No, you can't manufacture the commodity by yourself." Economically-productive renters lose all purchasing power, and landlords are effectively out of the labor force as they sit on top of feudal-dues extracted from their little 2-bedroom colony. Communists have the worst solutions, but no one points out problems quite as well as a Communist.
The housing extortion racket only works when housing is limited. Let people build and you'll see poverty drop like we've never seen before.
Nothing is entirely monocausal, so I'll do a quick rundown of secondary needs of poor people, how they are and aren't met. (or the pillaging section, as I'd call it)
Bad infrastructure = highways only = cars are needs = At least $5k+ $400/month-per-person just to live life vs 100$/month for top-tier subway systems. That's a lot of extra money for poor people.
Schools - are free
Hospitals - This is a big one, but a bigger topic for another day. (tl;dr - Doctors are evil.)
Safety - American small towns are remarkably safe. The lack of safety seems localized to certain communities, than tied poverty as a whole.
Wifi ? - Wifi is cheap enough
Employment - Unemployment is so low in the US, that the fed can't get people to lose jobs even as it tries its hardest.
So if current landlords are so bad, what's to keep anyone from undercutting them? If you're seriously suggesting co-ordination among all the landlords all the way from Blackrock to your middle-class salaryman, I'm not going to believe you.
Well, no, if you're poor enough, the pillaging might well be worse than the raping. Pretty much nobody in modern America is that poor, fortunately.
Natural monopoly. If everyone around them lowered their prices, they increase their market share. If you're one landlord out of 100 in the middle of a city and there are 100 families in need of housing, it doesn't matter if 99 of them cut their prices... that 100th family is still going to pay you.
Natural monopoly.... in a market that includes everyone from Blackrock to middle-class salarymen? There's at least hundreds of thousands of landlords in NYC alone. There's no monopoly at all, let alone a natural one.
Sure, I'm off on my terminology. Here's what I mean by the problem, maybe you can help me put it into economic terms:
If you and I share the market of soda evenly, and I price mine too high, you can double your production and take all my business. You can't really do that with land.
ETA: just want to acknowledge that yes, it was dumb to use an obviously technical term in a made-up way. My use of the terms I think is like this: It is a "monopoly" in that others are prevented from entering the market, and it is "natural" in that the barrier to entry is the fixed supply/location of land.
I think your just trying to talk about the idea of land "rent" in the formal theoretical sense of rent. Monopolists also have rents similar theoretically to land rents.
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There's no special economic term for this situation.
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