Things look pretty damned bleak to me.
By today's liberal standards, I would have been absolutely destitute when I grew up. I grew up without an Obamphone. I grew up without $300 sneakers. etc. But the idea of settling a dispute with a drive-by shooting or fathering a dozen children with a dozen different women would have been considered so bizarre that it wouldn't have made it as the plot of a bad pornographic dime novel.
Nor do they discuss how illegal immigrants and their children bolster our poverty stats, in short, making the US look bad on poverty statistics because it is inflated by Mexico and Central America’s poor.