It's true that, at least in my lifetime, poverty in America on the scale experienced by the poor in Third World countries has been pretty limited.  It's true, also, that as recently as 1920, perhaps 80% of the American population were, by our contemporary standards, "poor" or something like it.

But for most of my lifetime -- I am 55 -- it has seemed to me that, by and large, roughly 80 percent of the inhabitants of the USA could have tolerably comfortable lives by observing the "rules of the game."  OK housing, a tolerably mediocre dose of education and healthcare, a job, no need to eat dogfood in one's old age, or to live beneath the bridges.

Of the 20% at the bottom, many if not most were rural, or rural people displaced to cities that proved to overwhelm them, or immigrants, or persons laboring under the yoke of our history of slavery, massacre and removal to reservations, or mental illness.

I think the plan is that if you divvy up the Merkan population into quintiles, 5 groups, 1-2% of the top quintile is gonna rule everything, the remainder of the top 20% is to be pretty well-off, and the incomes and living standards of the second and third quintiles are to be reduced to roughly those now experienced by the fourth quintile.  So you'll have 20% in deep shit, 60% struggling sufficiently that they will be preoccupied with economic survival and little interested in politics, and just 20% or so to provide competent, well-educated lackeys to enable the 2% to keep everybody else in their place.

I make a six-figure income, but feel by no means secure.  I feel a real class war is well underway, and that most of us are pretending that it concerns us chiefly in moral terms, but isn't likely to really hurt us, that the piggies are gorging so avidly at the trough.

Soon, I suspect, nearly all of us will see that the plan is that we will be beaten down, hard, and even those of us who hang on to some of what was seen as the middle-class birthright in the 1970s will be living very, very precariously.