Your plastic data doesn't mean shit. Some people have always lived beyond their means.
1) saying 'some' have is very misleading... IN NO WAY was it prevalent. Not in ANY way close to what we see today. People even just 50 years ago could not get access to credit... let alone the credit levels we see today.
I lived through that time as an adult, not an eight year old. Your interpretation of bogus government charts doesn't mean shit to me.
Oh... so because you personally might have experienced better times then, we should throw out government statistics and the economic conditions as a whole?
Why are you comparing our poor to third world countries? Kind of telling. The OP says we are on our way, not we are, so obviously we are not there yet.
What is telling is your inability to comprehend what was written. I compared our poor to the poor of other 'first world' countries and to the MIDDLE Income classes of other countries. As I stated, our poor are better off than the vast majority of either category.
Do you deny trade imbalance, and that the creation of wealth has declined?
Do you understand what CAUSES the trade imbalance? The largest component is OIL. You want to bring that wealth back to the US? So do I. Here is how we do it.....
We need a 'going to the moon' type national initiative.... this one will be to convert transportation in the US from oil based gasoline to nat gas consumption. Make it a 3 or 5 year plan. In that time we do the following:
1) Drill our nat gas sites in the US
2) Owners of gas stations have that time to add nat gas distribution
3) Automakers have that time to retool their lines and escalate production of nat gas vehicles
4) Consumers using older vehicles can in the meantime convert existing vehicles to nat gas using tech already available.... subsidize it for those families making under $50k per year.
Transportation consumes about 70% of our oil consumption. Eliminate the bulk of that, drill nat gas here, increase oil production in the US and we can reach energy independence.
Obviously we can also increase R&D into clean/alt energy to develop the technologies of the next decade and beyond.
Do the above and you are going to eliminate the bulk of our trade deficit, return the money to the US, put US workers back to work, all of which increases domestic spending which will snow ball into the other sectors of the market.