America is the richest nation in the world, which would presuppose that being the richest nation in the world, that all of its people, almost without exception, would have fair access to a quality education, quality healthcare, quality food, quality income, and a quality life. After all, the International Monetary Fund shows that the United States gross domestic product (at purchasing power parity) per capita was at $62,608 in 2018, of which, it would seem that would be a sufficient amount of money to live a good life. Yet, though the per capita income is quite good, there is though, a monstrous disparity between those that have an incredible amount of almost unfathomable wealth, as compared to a massive underclass that are basically worth absolutely nothing in the wealth category, and often live lives of inferior quality in every conceivable way.
This wealth disparity creates all sorts of problems, of which, one of the most salient problems is the fact that those that have all the money in the world are not really consumers of products in the common meaning of the word, but essentially savers of money and to some degree investors of that money. On the other hand, those that are economically disadvantaged and therefore lack ready access to cash, have a strong interest in consuming as much as they reasonably can of all of the basic things that most humans have a need for, such as food, clothing, entertainment, gasoline, health, and education, but because they lack money they are therefore either going to have go without, or will have to budget accordingly with the limited resources that they do have, or go into debt to try to get what they need and desire.
Any country that sees fit to have the wealth created by the denizens of that country, essentially over-concentrated into the hands of the top 1% of the people within that country, is a country that not only will have a constant source of civil unrest, but will not be able to grow the economy of that nation at the pace which it should be at, because the coin of the realm is money, and those that have none of it, can procure little or nothing, and therefore will not be able to spend money on the necessities of life; and those that have nothing but money, aren't going to consume in aggregate all that much, because their bellies are already full with the very best that money can buy in the first place, and will thereby save the excess.
Every citizen within this nation deserves to make a true living wage, whether by the wages so received, and/or with the assistance of governmental programs that subsidize those citizens, so that each citizen therefore has a fair chance to actually have enough income to have some sort of meaningful purchasing power to procure the items that they have a desire to purchase. The continual economic malaise that this country suffers from is fundamentally because of the massive income inequality that this country has, of which, the commonsense solution to this conundrum is for those that have little or nothing to actually have a seat at the table of prosperity, in which, they will for a certainty, have a hearty appetite.