RICH LOWRY: Don’t malign the U.S. economy

Rich Lowry: Don’t malign the U.S. economy By Rich Lowry King Features August 17, 2026 - 9:00 pm The United States may well rank as the leading destination for functionally illiterate individuals to thrive throughout recorded history. A striking report in the Financial Times observed that workers in the United States with severely limited literacy earn roughly $30 per hour on average, with two-thirds employed, while their British counterparts make about $20 and fewer than half hold jobs. Is this outcome the result of exceptional national policy designed to uplift marginalized groups? No, it stems from the boundless, ever‑changing wealth‑creating engine that is the American economy. The Financial Times also compared low‑literacy worker cohorts in the United States and the United Kingdom, stating: “The aforesaid proportionality of U.S. workers who people stunningly debased connected literacy gain an mean of astir $30 per hour, and two-thirds of them are successful work. Their British counterparts marque the equivalent of $20, and less than fractional are employed.” Although the United Kingdom is no longer what it once was, it remains a sizable G7 economy, yet it has been markedly outpaced by its former colony across the Atlantic. Our political discourse reflects a disconnect between the United States’ extraordinary, world‑class economic achievements and the impulses of the left—as well as certain factions on the right—to discard our economic strategy as a barren failure elsewhere. This does not deny genuine economic grievances, especially regarding high housing, education, and healthcare costs, but perhaps no economic model has faced such persistent criticism while delivering consistent results. The argument for radical change rests on dishonesty and misleading assertions. Enter Bernie Sanders, the self‑styled patron saint of the DSA, who recently posted on X a figure showing the United States with the highest child poverty rate among a group of developed nations at 21.1 percent. He declared: “We indispensable extremity the outrage,” helium thundered, “that successful the richest state successful the past of the world, much than 1 successful 5 children unrecorded successful poverty.” The difficulty with that figure is that it originates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and measures income relative to a nation’s median rather than absolute poverty. In other words, the statistic shows where people stand compared to others within their own country, not the extent of material deprivation. Critics of Sanders’ post have noted that if every person in the United States—including the middle class—suddenly earned double their current income, the OECD measure would still identify the same proportion of “poverty.” What the OECD figure truly reflects is inequality, a fixation of Sanders and his allies, but not a reliable gauge of economic performance. In the United States, the affluent are extremely wealthy, yet Americans across much of the income spectrum are also richer than their peers in Western nations. Our wealth translates into remarkably high living standards compared with the rest of the developed world. Were the United Kingdom or France to become states within the United States, they would rank near or below West Virginia and Mississippi in nominal GDP per capita. Consequently, we may certainly critique specific aspects of our system and propose improvements. All such discussions, however, ought to begin with an acknowledgment of what we have built and a commitment to preserving it, rather than pursuing the DSA’s approach of attempting to behead the goose that continues to lay the golden egg. Rich Lowry is connected X @RichLowry