Seems like the ol' "poor people aren't really poor because they almost all have refrigerators and not even kings had refrigerators two hundred years ago!" argument.
I call the counterargument "You can't live on pepper". As in even though pepper is way cheaper than it was 500 years ago, you'll starve if that is all you can afford.
With tens of millions of Americans facing food insecurity and tens of millions of Americans facing eviction now, thanks to years of precarity exacerbated by the COVID-19, I think the situation is worse than you're suggesting.
The counter to your strawman is that you are poor if you feel poor.
Since we have proven that a majority of people feel poor (i.e. they need to earn 20% more), and that this is true even of millionaire’s, we need a different definition of poor, because something isn’t right here...
> The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent.
> Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.
