Your tax dollars paid for an unnecessary, politically biased, and factually wrong report released by the United Nations last month on poverty in America. Of course, in this day of the Twitter headline, the UN hopes you won't ask many questions as to how the report was compiled.
But United States Ambassador Nikki Haley asks all the right questions in this column for National Review and BLASTS the report.
Ambassador Haley points out:
1) A single researcher spent two weeks in our country, visiting four states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.
2) It fails to incorporate the vast majority of welfare assistance provided to low-income households, such as food stamps, Medicaid, and refundable tax credits. The report also exaggerates poverty by excluding pension and Social Security assets from its calculations.
3) It suggests that socialism is the solution (surprise!) by recommending higher taxes, government-run health care, and “decriminaliz[ing] being poor” (never mind that nowhere in America is it a crime to be poor).
Ambassador Haley's main complaint is that taxpayers resources were spent on studying poverty in a nation blessed by tremendous wealth (and featuring a social safety net) while not concentrating UN efforts on locations like the Congo, where 60 percent of the entire population lacks the basics of food and electricity.
Not surprising, socialist Bernie Sanders has embraced the report
Ironically, Ambassador Haley's column appeared on the same day that WHO News reported on an article in The Atlantic called "Say Hello to Full Employment" and subtitled, "Want to know where the economy is headed? Look at Des Moines."
The article points out full employment empowers workers by driving up wages and bringing new people into the workforce. It's not an article that your socialist friends will be sharing because these opportunities for young and old, lower-skilled workers, and the formerly incarcerated were not brought about by protests demanding an increase in the minimum wage.