My life has exhibited at various points a preponderance of the issues that your grandparents faced. Most people I know still cope with issues mentioned above. I'm not sure why you believe that poverty has vanished even among people on minimum wage: it has absolutely not.
> Saying that poverty is significantly and astoundingly reduced
... is still going to get a lot of people angry, even if you explicitly limit your scope to the First World. It's a combination of lack of historical perspective coupled with a perception that admitting anything has improved is tantamount to agreeing with the people who think social welfare programs need to be eliminated.
Depends on your definition of poverty. Poverty in the sense of the aforementioned grandparents has - only a fraction of a % of the population of the US lacks indoor plumbing.
In the US, people with earned income < $5k/year still tend to consume $23k/year.
We have an organization here in the UK called the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who lobby on poverty and publish statistics, but they use a relative measure of poverty as basically, being in the bottom third of the population. So, if your next-door neighbours on both sides are watching Blu-ray and you have a lowly DVD player, then they would count you as "living in poverty" for the purposes of the statistics they compile.
When you consider that the very poorest in the UK have free housing, welfare, free education and healthcare, etc, then "poverty" in a global sense is very obviously long since eliminated here.
