> Taxes are not handouts

Taxes fund welfare/entitlements, which are literally handouts. Your beef is with the mechanism by which the welfare is funded.

> Ultra rich people can change tax laws to benefit them so that they can throw some money on a charity. Why do you think that is good option?

I'm not making a value judgement, I'm showing you the current result of it. You took issue with the observation that consumption metrics include "handouts", implying a hypothetical that such handouts might cease to exist. I rebutted that hypotheticals are impossible to falsify, and that the real world results speak for themselves.

> Not sure why a random blog post is data point.

It's not a "random blog post", it's data published by Indeed's labor market research lab. In any case, the idea that the collective standard of living typically improves with bull markets, and that the last 10 years have been a bull market...isn't controversial.

> What cultural differences make Americans do more drugs and be more obese?

Great question, we don't know! But it's a phenomenon that we observe empirically: Americans on average consume more sugar, eat less healthy, and abuse more opioids. Evidence in the link I shared shows that simply changing that culture can bring the average life expectancy to parity with OECD peer nations (modulo car crashes and gun homicides).

> And yet US is behind among the developed world.

Again, you're using a metric that internally compares income, and using that to somehow make external comparisons between cohorts. "Inequality adjusted HDI" does not tell us what the absolute standard of living is, and it does not tell us how the poor in the US fare compared to poor people in other countries — it just tells us how unequal the US is. The poorest people in America could be richer than even the median earners of every other country, and the inequality-adjusted HDI wouldn't change all that much as long as there are ultra-rich billionaires like Bezos, Gates, et al. The GP comment claimed: "Isnt the US poor people in worse conditions than the poor in other developed countries?". Inequality-adjusted HDI is ill-equipped to answer that question. The specific answer to that question is "No", based on the specific, directly related metric that compares the standard of living of the bottom 20% of the US with their counterparts in other comparable OECD countries.

Even median earners in the US are better off than their counterparts in most other comparable rich countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

You wouldn't know that by looking at the inequality-adjusted HDI, because what it measures is completely unrelated.

To remind you again: Internally relative comparisons compared across countries (like inequality-adjusted HDI and poverty rate) tell us close to nothing about how well off (or not) the poor are. To suggest otherwise is just poor data science. The important metric as it relates to the GP commenter here are those that directly compare standards of living across countries, by income level (apples to apples) — and that's typically done by measuring PPP adjusted income and/or consumption by quintile, and then comparing those across countries.