> can only manage to afford shit like dry pasta
Go tell someone who is starving to death in Yemen or South Sudan how having access to dry pasta is the equivalent of real poverty. I'm sure they would correct you had they the energy.
> The smartphone thing is moot;
You only underscore my point. You take having a smartphone (a product of the Neoliberal system) so for granted that you believe it is "dumb" to point it out. A smartphone would have appeared as God's Real Magic 100 years ago. It is one of the most powerful tools ever built by mankind.
> There's a lot of whataboutism as well,
You literally "what about" multiple times in your own reply.
Raising the minimum wage will result in fewer people getting jobs. This is accepted as fact by economists.
As for your other prescriptions, they amount to, "Just do it." In other words, they are equally naive or uninformed. These are intractable problems in ultra complex systems that do not have easy or obvious solutions. For example, you write, "fix the health care system and make it affordable for everyone". Please do explain how to do this. But in your reply, please make sure to show your work. For instance, what are the trade-offs to a single payer healthcare system? Talk to any Briton over a pint and they will enumerate a long list of cons to their healthcare system, some of them very serious. When it comes to ultra complex systems, when one pulls one lever, a thousand others move, often in unexpected ways.
You are saying a lot of people are obese and not hungry; what about the ones that can only manage to afford shit like dry pasta?
Housed, what about the over half a million homeless? What about the ones that aren't technically homeless but live couch to couch, in a van, or with family even though they have a family of their own? And what about the ones that can hardly make rent every month, let alone never have a chance at home ownership?
The smartphone thing is moot; they can be cheap, and they cost a fraction of, say, a month of rent. The "you have a smartphone so you can't be poor" line is just dumb.
There's a lot of whataboutism as well, i.e. "what about these other people who have it worse"; it's not like it's one or the other. There's wealth inequality, and there's poverty in many forms - poverty that seems intentional and avoidable.
The solution? It's not easy, but raise the minimum wage, tackle the housing crisis; fix the health care system and make it affordable for everyone; tax the rich and do a Robin Hood, or at least fix the infrastructure, reduce the decades long exorbitant spending on the army in favor of health care, public health and education.
And I think all of these can be made to work together with this neoliberalism thing. It just requires some people to give up some of their privileges.