The point is, when the media cries "poverty", the average person doesn't think "car, house, microwave, satellite TV, computer, nice things of various sorts-see list" which are now more the norm than not. The average person thinks "falling-down tenement with leaky roof and no electric or plumbing and infested with rats and cockroaches" and the tenant-farmer shacks of the 1920s.
I'm not convinced that the "average person" thinks anything like that. In particular, you have to be pretty rural before (unreliable) electricity and (leaky, easily-broken) plumbing go away. The inclusion of microwaves and VCRs in the list is very odd. Microwaves cost maybe $50 new and can easily last for a decade. Microwave food is the epitome of a cheap meal -- think ramen noodles. Also, $5 will not buy a week's worth of decent nutrition in any city I've ever been to. (I mean normal nutrition, not fancy organic boutique stuff.) As for VCRs... can you even buy those in stores anymore? None of the upper middle class people I know still have VCRs. I strongly suspect you could use VCR ownership as an indicator of poverty, not wealth. That list was written in 2011! Why are they still talking about VCRs?
There are other oddities too. Air conditioning is not an extravagant luxury if you live in the southern US, and window units don't cost a fortune. They often come with apartments. Wide-screen plasma and LCD TVs have been the only kind sold for years, and are the only kind that can properly show even broadcast TV today. Only a third of poor people have one, but that's evidence of widespread luxury? (The rest of the study says big screen, but the actual survey data looks like they meant wide-screen.) You can get dial-up internet access for $10/month in some places. In short, the list you linked to is quite consistent with poor people having used, low-quality items, focusing on necessities with the higher-income people having a few small extras. It's certainly better than Sub-Saharan Africa, but that's a pretty low bar for the richest country in the world. I'm not even going to start on the massive double standard of telling poor people that they're not really poor while complaining about rich people being massively over-taxed.
Incidentally, the lead author on that list is also described as a sex education expert who promotes abstinence-only sex ed, which should tell you something about his intellectual honesty. (The Heritage Foundation backs him on that, by the way.) Skimming through the study, some of the measures look questionable. It wouldn't surprised me if they were cherry-picking data.