Famine, Affluence and Morality

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My philosophy professor had the class read Peter Singer's famous "Famine, Affluence and Morality" essay written in 1971. He begins with two premises that no one could dispute: suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad, and that if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we should do it.
These seem like pretty innocuous assumptions, but based on them, Singer argues that we ought to give until we reach the limit of marginal utility, or until we approach the poverty of those we are aiding. He writes this of the starvation of the Bangladesh Liberation War refugees, and his argument is valid based on the premises (read it if you're skeptical). Now, he doesn't mean that we should give up everything so that the Bengali people all have big-screen TV's, but if we all did our part, we could remove the suffering and pain they feel, which is Singer's point.
I came away with several things the least of which is that if one wants to successfully persuade, they should use premises that the other party agrees with. That's why ham-fisted political idealogues have such little success. The bigger thing is though that poverty is real and wretched, and something we must act on if we subscribe to Singer's assumptions.