From poverty, slavery and an early death in two hundred years

Let's get real. Driven by fossil fuels, ingenuity and the American Dream, America has led the world from a life of miserable poverty for the vast majority of Americans and a life for most described by the Brits as "nasty, brutish and short."

America, two hundred years ago: More than 90% of Americans were poor. A large number of those living in the US were slaves, enslaved and sold by their peers in Africa. On average, women gave birth to eight children and four those children died by the age of five; life expectancy was about 46 years. Many of the basic amenities we take for granted and provide even for the poorest people today, did not exist: running water, indoor bathrooms, personal transportation, telecommunications, central heat and -- for a large number of people -- air conditioning, antibiotics, and a number of widespread social welfare programs, e.g, healthcare, sanitation, food stamps, public housing, to name a few.

Today, poverty rates are below 15% and those living in poverty" have benefits and living conditions that the nineteenth-century wealthy would envy. Slavery only exists among the wages slaves of college graduates with tens of thousands of debt; the irony is that reparation claims for slavery are quite similar to loan forgiveness for college debtors. Further irony is the slaves who were freed as a results of 600,000 men dying in the Civil War, they were not much worse off at the end of the war than were most of those non-enslaved immigrants for the first 125 years of America's existence. Infant mortality is almost too small to measure; the problems with infants reside primarily with poor, unemployed, single teen mothers.