You are all now voicing opinion and not fact.

I very carefully chose what I posted because it seemed to come from sources that were either those of the US government itself or from another country.

There were far, far more sources, but I rejected them because they were various causes or "think tanks" of one sort or another. (I also rejected those in pdf, mostly because I didn't want to be bothered with opening and closing Adobe Acrobat Reader -- if you'd like a detailed search, done on my own time, I'll PM you my billable and it ain't cheap.) You might try a search with the terms (including the quotation marks) "poverty in US" or "US economic indicators" or similar things.

What I find interesting is that while unemployment is, overall, down, so are average wages and benefits while borrowing AT ALL LEVELS is up, up, up.

If you want to worry a bit, check out the real estate bubble. Check how many people have 'interest only' mortgages. Check out the load of debt each person in the US is carrying -- personal debt, I'll leave the federal debt out of this -- and compare it to the level of savings. Do this for the last five or ten years, and then do the same thing for the late 1920s as best you can.

Compare the numbers of students who graduated from college last year in math, engineering, chemistry, physics, computer science, and biology with the number of those who graduated in those areas in China and India.

The problem in the US isn't a lack of will or innate ability. The problem in the US is a refusal to think -- because education has consistently refused, for at least three decades, to teach students how to do so.

And very soon now all of these chickens will be coming home to roost....