Is America a poor nation? Some Democrats seem to think so, as political analyst David Harsanyi outlines in an NRPlus member article at National Review.

In a now-deleted tweet, progressive representative Pramila Jayapal made the wild claim that the “U.S. has nearly ONE-THIRD of the world’s billionaires. Meanwhile, our poverty rate is the 4th highest in the world. Tax the rich.” Big if true! But the fact that any elected official could, even for a fleeting moment, believe that the United States had anywhere near the highest poverty rate in the world tells us a lot about the progressive mindset and policy goals.

Democrats tend to perfunctorily portray the United States as a poverty-stricken plutocracy where “[t]rillionaires and billionaires are doing very, very well,” as Joe Biden argued the other day when peddling his massive state expansion, but “the middle class keeps getting hurt.” This idea is driven by a zero-sum obsession with “inequality,” and not the reality of a nation where the largest economic movement over the past decade has been from the middle class to the upper middle class.

Progressives tend to contrast the fortunes of low-income Americans with their high-income neighbors. And maybe this works as a domestic-populist political attack. Any global comparisons, however, will only illustrate the superiority of American economic life.

“By world benchmarks,” he says, “there are very few impoverished people in the United States.” In fact, many nations rank lower than many states in GDP. Moreover, he adds:

The United States has the highest per capita wealth in the world and the sixth-highest median income in the world — a somewhat misleading statistic, as it measures the earning power of an individual but fails to take into account the accumulated wealth of Americans. … Although the United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we generate and earn more than 20 percent of its income.“

The U.S. economy is the largest in the world, accounting for a quarter of world GDP — the same since 1980 — and it sustains 330-350 million people.

Harsanyi concludes:

Now, by American standards, there are plenty of poor people among us. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise or demean their struggles. There is, however, little evidence that we lag behind any major nation. Nor is there any evidence that our economic system benefits fewer people than any other. Yet, a growing faction of voters are convinced that they’re living in one of the most iniquitous countries in the world. Joe Biden says he ran for the presidency to "change the dynamic of how the economy grows.” But progressive redistributionist policies, as we’ve seen elsewhere around the world, would make us less dynamic, less wealthy, and less innovative.

Read the whole thing here (subscription only).