There was a time when nearly every article covering foreign issues (note how I deftly tread around my promise to never discuss US foreign policy here) tossed about this bromide to illustrate how dire conditions were in some far off place. But today the dollar is so impotent that, according to my Googling, the expression is only used occasionally. A Google search uncovered the trite expression when discussing "parts" of India's population and "a number" of people in South Sudan. No more is it used in many countries where it was a decade ago.
In many formerly desperately poor countries, things are improving. The situation in many of these nations is now simply poor, as opposed to really, really, really poor. And that's progress- progress which has come about because of robust markets and open trade.
In our own country, the cannibalization of our currency to placate the demands of Johnny Flatscreen and Jane Zinfandel, with their need for easy credit and federal money for autism research, has resulted in a massive, nearly unnoticed drop in prosperity. We have been so busy buying cheap things imported from poor countries, that we have scarcely noticed that they are becoming less poor (to some extent at our expense).
Maybe when Americans start reading about how the poor in India are getting by on "less than ten dollars per day" the truth of our situation will become apparent, and we can get to work on saving the dollar- and our ability to dispense platitudes.