The Texas colonias are inhabited by people who crossed into the US from Mexico. There are many Americans citizens there because everyone born in the US is automatically a citizen. But their standard of living says nothing about the accuracy of the statistics addressing the standard of living at the 20th percentile. (That’s 60 million people from the bottom.)

That’s not to say we shouldn’t “do something” about their living condition, just that your post is a non-sequitor. When Sweden accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees, the median income of the country almost certainly went down. But that doesn’t mean everyone became poorer.

The post I am replying to claims that the "20% poorest" in the US have it better than middle-class Europeans which is such a ludicrous claim as to require posts like mine to provide the context of reality.

To your stuff about Sweden and refugees, income and wealth are related but separate concepts.

But you’re not replying to the post! Pointing to the plight of people in the Texas colonias tells you literally nothing about the point made in the post you’re replying to. If it was talking about people at the bottom 3% you’d have a point.

As to your changing the goal posts by talking about healthcare. There is nothing “perverse and dishonest” about measuring which country is the “richest” based on capacity for consumption. The vast majority of Americans, even at the 20th percentile, will never go bankrupt due to medical bills. But they will all get to enjoy much higher consumption (bigger houses, more cars, more TVs) than the average European. (And maybe, just maybe, Americans aren’t irrational and simply prefer the trade off they have made.)

Now, you may personally value the security of not having the possibility of crippling medical debt over the potential for higher consumption. I probably would too! But it’s not so obviously the only correct way to view things that it would be “perverse” and “objectively dishonest” to measure which country is the “richest” in a way that doesn’t place dispositive value on that security. Put differently, you’re simply defining “being rich” as “being secure.” That’s not the only way to define it.

How did you show the study OP cited as “false” by pointing to google image search of migrant communities on the border of Texas and Mexico?

Also, France has slums too: https://www.thelocal.fr/20171020/more-than-570-slums-house-1.... Any assertion that the French are better off than Bangladesh must be “false.”

For some perspective Bulgaria, an EU member state, has a population of 7 million and an average salary of around $700 per month, or $8,400 per year. That would put you way below the poverty line in the USA.

Minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour. A full-time minimum wage worker in Texas can surpass the average Bulgarian's monthly wage in under 2.5 weeks.

And that's just the average wage. More than half of the 7 million residents live below that. For every cherry picked colony in Texas, there's several even poorer villages in the post-Soviet states to cancel it out.

That is in pure $$. According to wikipedia, the PPP according is $24,485. There is 80-90% house ownership. Income tax is 10%. It's hard to make a reasonable comparison like that.

Another example is Czech Republic, which has the lowest poverty rate in EU - under 10% before Finland and Netherlands. And yet it's way after them in the wealth list.