The United Nations has, once again, insisted that American levels of poverty are vast and demeaning to such a rich nation. The U.N. is, once again, misunderstanding the various statistics it is manipulating. The underlying truth is that the U.S. is more unequal than most other rich nations, and that’s really all that is being said.

This is actually a report by a Special Rapporteur, in this case Philip Alston. I discussed the errors in his draft report with you here. The final report is here. I’ve also been in direct contact with Alston and his reaction to those earlier criticisms was, in effect, gosh, yes, this is all difficult, isn’t it? That doesn’t excuse either the general reporting upon this nor the error at the heart of the report itself.