With the Biden administration’s spending dreams on the cusp of death, Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal took to Twitter to demand we tax the rich, in the process claiming that we have the fourth-highest poverty rate on the planet.
There is not one possible way to spin the figures to render this anything other than a laughable lie.
If we were actually the fourth most impoverished nation on Earth, we would be poorer than nations currently suffering active civil wars, such as Yemen. We would be the poorest except for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and South Sudan.
Of course, we’re not anything like that. Only 1% of all Americans — impoverished homeless addicts, for the most part — live under the World Bank’s extreme global poverty line of $1.90 per day. Not even twice that number live under $5.50 per day. The poor in the U.S. live like the wealthiest in other countries.
Our domestic measure of poverty, on the other hand, isn’t a fixed number but rather a formula. The Census Bureau considers a household below the poverty line if a household’s income cannot cover its “threshold.” The Census Bureau updates its charts of what constitute the threshold for a household, using size and age of residents as inputs, every year. For example, in 2020, the threshold of someone under 65 living alone was $13,465, whereas for two parents with a child, it would be $17,839.
Even given that far more liberal definition, just 11.4% of Americans qualified as living below the poverty line last year. That figure is even more impressive when considering what an American at the poverty line has versus those in other countries. Department of Energy data show that even as far back as 2005, nearly 100% of poor households had refrigerators and stoves. As far back as 2011, 89% of households had cellphones. In short, far more households are able to afford goods such as dishwashers and computers that improve quality of life in a way not accounted for by the poverty line formula.
Could a nation where even the average person at the poverty line has air conditioning and a computer really be comparable to Rwanda or Papua New Guinea, much less Guatemala and Haiti, from which thousands are desperately traversing seas and deserts to come here?
Obviously not. But Jayapal clearly believes her constituents are stupid enough to believe it.
