A country is made up of its entire people, from rich to poor, from smart to stupid, and from good health to bad infirmity. While the United States is populated with some of the very best and brightest throughout the entire world, as well as having the highest amount of billionaires, in addition to the impressive abundance of its great athletes; so too, as reported by huffingtonpost.com, "14.5 percent of all Americans, lived below the poverty line", as well as reported by huffingtonpost.com, a disappointing "32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read," and finally healthfitnessrevolution.com reports that: "Because of these alarming obesity rates, this generation of children will be the first to live shorter lives than their parents."
For the most part, the fact that such a wide swath of Americans are in poor health, often in conjunction with having made bad health choices, along with so many being so ill educated that they are functionally illiterate, in addition to so many Americans not being able to sustain themselves without receiving some sort of charitable or governmental aid actually represents a true reflection of a country that despite its great resources and riches, has not been able to lift all boats. In fact, quite clearly, it seems like a significant percentage of Americans have simply been left behind, and are thereby treated as an afterthought or an inconvenient annoyance within our capitalistic system.
A clear headed view of our current state of affairs, leads reasonable people to conclude, that more than anything, it is systemic poverty that is the abettor of our current sad state of affairs. That is to say, those that are the poorest amongst us, are stuck within a desperate situation in which there really isn't an escape from living in communities of high crime, high dysfunction, high single-family households, which produces people of low income, low opportunity, and low social status.
It isn’t surprising that those that live in bleak circumstances, have bleak lives, for there typically aren't any good paying jobs within their given community, as well as they are often inundated with convenience stores that cater to cheap calories of questionable food nutritional value, have little good medical care within their sphere, and the public schools that they are assigned to, aren't even worthy of being considered education, in respect to the full meaning of that word.
This means, in effect, that the 14.5 percent of Americans that live below the poverty line, are essentially hopeless and without hope that there ever will be change, for there aren't any bootstraps to lift themselves up by, for their boots, if they even have them, are of the cheapest quality possible and those particular boots have no straps to lift with. So that, such poverty and such ill education leads to millions upon millions of Americans, being both ignorant of proper language skills as well as inept at accomplishing even the most simplest of mathematical exercises. All of this leading to the inevitable general attitude of apathy, for their dreams of being a person of substance, are totally annihilated before they even reach middle school.
So what we have is that all those that are successful people of some means, must carry upon their backs all those that are impoverished, for governmental programs are ultimately funded by taxpaying citizens, for the government gets its money from the people, meaning that, everyone that is not self-sustaining becomes a burden to the nation as a whole. So these millions of people, poor, disadvantaged, ignorant, of ill health, and apathetic have wasted lives of basic hopelessness, of which, to the disgrace of America, nothing of substance is being done to correct it, for despite our great wealth, the huddled masses of the poor and destitute are a true reflection of the American dream gone horribly awry.