Maybe try restating your point in units of food and shelter. Dollars have no intrinsic value.

So perhaps move those poor americans to the third world. They'll feel like top 1% with those dollars.

That's basically the history of South Africa.

A regular income person is a millionaire in South Africa. It caused some problems.

Will their income move with them?

Please don't - here in India we don't need a bunch of people too lazy to make their way in America.

Says the person who wants them to all come to the US.

"I agree with that [immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone] and support more or less open borders" - yummyfajitas

I should have caveated that statement with the fact that immigrants must be good people who sell labor to willing buyers and don't victimize innocents. I thought I made that clear by mentioning comparative advantage.

Unfortunately most poor Americans refuse to work, commit disability fraud and otherwise exploit the taxpayer, and commit disproportionate amounts of crime. (Far more than Indians - I've never felt unsafe in any slum here, unlike in the US). You don't get any comparative advantage from people who refuse to trade and merely take things from you.

Definitely saw similar things discussed in an East Asia -> SE Asia context and I had conflicting feelings about it as well.

Why not? as long as they spend their money, it would be good for India.

You could probably use their money though, no?

It's comparable, I guess?

$30k for a family of 4 is $20 per person per day. That's 8 times more than $2.50, but the cost of living in CA is (probably?) approximately 8x the cost of living of Africa, rural India, China, etc (where these 3 billion people live.)

As with everything in life, context matters.

Context, yes. They can tell me about how they are struggling to make ends meet because of their two car payments and interest only mortgage. That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea, because they get their drinking water straight out of a dirty river and you don't have access to simple medications.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. "That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea" is exactly the kind of argument we don't need.

The problem is that in countries where you can survive on $2/day, you can also largely squat where you want and scrounge crude shelter whilst begging for food.

You can't do any of that in California, in any reliable way... and in many parts of the state, $30k/yr just isn't enough to rent an apartment and cover the basics (food, transport, medical care). So yes, the poor in the US are both better and worse off than poor in the developing world.

Ya, the bottom in the developed world, and especially in California, is much higher. In china you can find a moldy room in an apartment building basement (no window!), or even sleep in the restaurant you are working in (many people live in their shops in Beijing, and I don't mean above them in something like an apartment!). For food, there are plenty of places that cut corners to keep costs down, you'll live but you might get cancer later.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans was popular because survival was similarly cheap, not for the same quality of survival, but the bottom possible was lower.

Actually, $2/day is actually completely manageable in rural India. I mean you won't be eating fancy stuff, but you'd be nowhere as miserable as being alone/homeless in the US.

You've got a pretty stereotypical view of the developing world.

Nevertheless, SF actually has pretty good services for the homeless. That's why there's a lot of homeless people there.

Given also that the median black household income in California is $35k, it sounds like you can actually survive of $30k in Cali without your kids dying of dysentery. Alternatively, if you want to 'scrounge crude shelter', there's 11 million square miles of public land in California.

In short, my eyes just about goggled out of my head when the response to "kids die from drinking dirty water" is "yeah, but they can live wherever they want".

>in many parts of the state, $30k/yr just isn't enough to rent an apartment and cover the basics

Oh no, I can't afford beach front property or a mansion in Beverly Hills on $30K a year? Poverty!

http://www.apartmentcities.com/Los-Angeles-Apartments/Los-An...

15 pages under $500 in Los Angeles.

>and worse off than poor in the developing world.

So you won't mind moving there and living on a local salary, eh?

Would you please not comment like this here? If you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't post.

Improvement isn't debt. Interest on debts is a direct transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the haves.