Look at the definition of poverty and you'll agree it's certainly a form of poverty, but again compared to the majority of the planet doesn't really cut it.

Living paycheck to paycheck is generally an unfortunate choice or lack of education, but the point remains that there's a paycheck.

And I can certainly agree that the culture of credit/debt isn't the best.

> Just because the average American has it much better than the average African doesn't mean their situation is necessarily very good.

I completely agree, it's not good at all. I think this underlies my point at the beginning that we need to give even if we don't have $45B. Our ability to generate the paycheck or our ownership of assets on average outstretches the vast majority of the planet.

[the following is copied from previous comments I've made on this subject]

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/nationaldata.html Americans below the poverty line in 2009 are more likely to have things like complete kitchens, complete plumbing, automobiles, air conditioning, and dishwashers than Americans as a whole in 1970. Put another way, if we used the living conditions of someone at the poverty line right now and used that to define the poverty line in 1970, over half of the 1970 population would be below the poverty line.

.... the definition [of poverty] is tied to CPI, which is tied to housing costs, which are more likely to include the cost of a full kitchen now than in the past especially for people near the bottom. I would argue that for someone in that position, having a full kitchen is better than not. Yet the CPI-based measure treats the cost of having a full kitchen as a negative (inflation), without treating the benefit of the full kitchen as a positive

[end copied segment]

Point being, the definition of "poverty" has some hidden inflation built in.