One way to know that poverty is pretty much ELIMINATED is the lack of news articles about starving kids, or starving adults, for that matter. Think about it, the media would have a FIELD DAY with anyone “legitimately starving” as that would increase the pressure to spend even more on this solved problem.
By “legitimately starving”, I’m referring to drugs/alcohol/mental illness, or being a College-Educated Woman - all of which interferes with the ability of a person to think logically enough to access the HUGE amount of services available. The cases we do hear about involving children always result in arrests, meaning the kids find much better homes.
Food is cheap, VERY CHEAP, in this country, compared to money available for these basket cases (very cheap food is also crappy, but there are some very cheap and very healthy foods that cost next to nothing too, but I talk enough about that in threads).
US is the only country where poor people are obese!
Starving people are by definition slim.
Imagine the Auschwitz pictures. THOSE people were really, unquestionably, starving!
Contrast it the line of overweight people in the USA waiting for free food!