In real terms, poor people are much better off right now than they have ever been.
Think about it like this. The lowest income people in this country still have just about everything someone like Warren Buffet has. Poor people have cars with GPS systems that do just as good a job of getting them from point A to point B as Warren Buffet's driver uses. Computers, cell phones, air-conditioning, huge TVs at one point in history, were reserved only for the wealthy. These days, just about anything a wealthy person has is available to most poor people, just in a lower end version of that same thing.
In terms of buying power for basic necessities like food, medicine and such, people might be poorer today, but the amount of dollars you have is not as good a bar to measure things by as it once was, mostly due to technological advances that have brough the price of most hard consumer goods down to the level of reasonable affordability to even the poorest people in the US.
Hookers and blow? Ok, maybe out of reach of a large percentage of poor people, but most other "gadgets" are far more in reach.
Id say its a wash, really. A few pluses, a few minuses.