America’s Richest Congressman, Worth Almost $500 Million, Says Poor Americans Are Doing Great

Congressman Darrell Issa, America’s richest Congressman with a net worth of nearly $500 million, says the nation’s poor are actually doing very well. Issa told CNN that “our poor are… the envy of the world.”

Issa said that, compared to India, America’s poor were living with greater incomes, more opportunity to climb the economic ladder and better access to quality education. CNN reporter Cristina Alesci rejected the comparison. “We don’t want to compare ourselves to India, we want to set the bar pretty high,” she said.

But Issa persisted, suggesting that if wages for lower-income Americans grow too high, American products would not be able to compete on the global marketplace.

In reality, economic mobility in American is lower than in many developed countries. According to research by Miles Corak, there is less economic mobility in America than in Switzerland, Pakistan, Singapore, France, Spain, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

Even in terms of raw dollars, America’s poor are far behind “compared with their counterparts in other affluent countries.” At the 10th percentile of income, for example, Canadians make 30 percent more and Norwegians makes 60 percent more.

According to a study by Luke Shaefer and Kathryn Edin, “millions of Americans live on less than $2 a day — a threshold commonly used to measure poverty in the developing world.”

Original Article
Source: thinkprogress.org/
Author:  JUDD LEGUM