> The second link has the same 2010 chart, where is the more recent data?

I'll have to find some more recent data — but the state of the world hasn't dramatically deteriorated since 2010. In fact, the opposite has happened: we've experienced recovery since the Financial Crisis of 2008, so we should expect the numbers to be even better. In many ways, 2010 represents the low watermark for most metrics.

As a data point, in 2019, the wage growth for low-wage earners out-paced that of the higher wage-earners: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/03/05/february-jobs-report-pr...

> A nation should not be dependent on handouts from rich people.

Eh? Why not? This is certainly debatable and not some axiomatic truth. The vast majority of the world works on handouts from rich people — it either comes in the form of taxes and transfers, or voluntary handouts. In the US, we see that both play a role in maintaining the high standards of living we enjoy. All that matters is the standard of living, given the current set of systems. The disposable income and consumption metric is downstream of all potential sources of material income, which enables access to goods/services/resources.

Also, "without the handouts", if the state of the US deteriorates, this impacts the political will to turn voluntary handouts into taxes and transfers: you can't change a variable in the system, then conclude that all other variables will remain constant. And even if you do account for all variable changes, it's still a hypothetical. It's impossible to refute or falsify hypotheticals and counterfactuals.

> Which comes back to education, which means they dont get proper education compared to their peers in other developed countries.

Erm, okay — but the US is one of the most educated countries in the world. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/30/the-10-most-educated-countri...

Total inflation adjusted per pupil education funding is the highest it's ever been: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...

In any case, if you’re making the argument that drug abuse and unhealthy diets are caused by the K-12 education system rather than cultural differences, you’re going to have to back that up. Pretty much everyone in the US attends an increasingly funded (though perhaps inefficiently administered) public school, where we learn that drugs are bad and that eating your vegetables is good.

> Yes but then why is poverty rate high as well compared to other developed nations.

Because poverty rate is a relative measure within the country, not a comparative measure across countries. We measure it by drawing a line in the income/wealth distribution, and determining the percentage that live below that line. What it doesn't tell us is how the absolute standard of living for someone below that line in country A compares to their counterpart in country B (ask yourself what it means to live in poverty in Switzerland vs Swaziland). It also doesn't account for taxes and transfers. That's exactly what the analyses I've linked shows. After taxes and transfers, the bottom 20% of Americans enjoy a higher standard of living than their counterparts in comparable OECD countries — measured by PPP adjusted disposable income and consumption.