If you're American and you care about poverty -- as in relative poverty -- in your country and you want to do something about it, more power to you. It's not like someone being much poorer elsewhere prevents you from caring about a problem in your country. But please don't trivialize abject poverty by implying that the American working class have it as hard as the lower classes in the developing world.
It doesn't matter what some parts of the US anecdotally and subjectively "look like", they don't measure nowhere near as poor as rural Philippines or Vietnam. Or urban Philippines/Vietnam for that matter.
In those countries, the literacy rate is around 95%. Imagine 5% of people around you are illiterate. Even in Brazil, a so-called "emergent" country or "upper-middle income" country, the literacy rate is only 92%. So 8% are illiterate; not "functionally illiterate" as in unable to correctly interpret certain texts, mind you, but actually unable to read. You cannot get a fast-food job or work as a Walmart greeter if you're illiterate! In contrast, in developed countries the literacy rate is >99%.
In the Philippines, 1 in 3 children are malnourished.[0] This isn't some vaguely defined "food insecurity" concept; it's actually malnourishment, kids being severely underweight and stunted.
In the US millions of people can take advantage of welfare benefits. So even the non-working poor in the US have much, much better living standards than the working poor in the developing world. Also, when exactly did the US bulldoze a shantytown? And so on.
[0] http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/hunger/141134-philippi...
