More telling: Child hunger has largely been wiped out as a major social problem in America. While deplorable instances of hungry children still occur (usually attributable to bad parenting), the real nutritional problem we face today is fat kids.

Not only is poverty relative, it has less to do with money than most people think. Technological innovation makes life less expensive. Fifty years ago, a refrigerator was a big investment, even for the middle class. But it was worth it because it made it possible to buy food in bulk.

Today, refrigerators may not be supercheap, but they're affordable. And the cheapest fridge today is far more advanced than a fridge from two decades ago. Ten years ago, a cell phone was a luxury. Today, they're ubiquitous -even in the poorest neighborhoods.

Here's how relative our understanding of poverty is: The average poor person in America is richer than many entire villages in Africa or Asia, where they still have no phones, refrigerators, and very little food.

Many on the left -particularly those still in a Marxist haze -reject the idea that poverty should be viewed in absolute terms. But when you think about it, they have to. If we all agreed that many of the poorest people in America live with the material prosperity -cars, phones, air conditioning, the caloric intake of a Roman emperor -we associated with millionaires just a few generations ago, most of the liberal agenda would have to go out the window.

Of course, this is all easy for me to say. I don't live in poverty, relative or absolute. And many millions of people are struggling to make ends meet, put food on the table and educate their kids. But that's not because of income inequality. If Bill Gates doubled his income tomorrow, poor people would still have a hard time. Income inequality doesn't make people poor, it just strikes some people as unfair.

But some economists believe that if Bill Gates and those like him got a lot richer, there'd be fewer poor people. In a new book put out by the American Enterprise Institute, Inequality and Tax Policy, contributor Robert Barro of Harvard notes that in wealthy countries, there's a strong link between rising income inequality and rising economic growth.

That's the way you'd think it would work, in Gatesbergia and in America.