After the United Nation report about poverty in U.S.A. where it states that 18.5 million Americans live in “extreme poverty” and 5.3 million live in “Third World conditions of absolute poverty”. The United States envoy to U.N. Nikki Haley criticized the report.
Haley said, “the United Nations released a report about poverty in America. A single researcher spent two weeks in our country, visiting four states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. His report was harshly critical, condemning America for “punish[ing] those who are not in employment,” among other farcical notions.
But as the United States ambassador to the United Nations, my job is to help protect American interests and tax dollars at the U.N. It is patently ridiculous for the U.N. to spend its scarce resources — more of which come from the United States than from any other country — studying poverty in the wealthiest country in the world, a country where the vast majority is not in poverty, and where public and private-sector social safety nets are firmly in place to help those who are.
Instead, the U.N. might have studied poverty in the Congo, where 60 percent of the entire population lacks the basics of food and electricity. Or Burundi, where the typical annual income is $280. Or Venezuela, where narco-state dictators have driven a once prosperous country into the ground with an inflation rate over 25,000 percent, and where diseases that were once thought eliminated are now reappearing.
When there are many dozens of countries where poverty consumes most of the population, and where corrupt governments deliberately make the problem much worse, why would the U.N. study poverty in America? The answer is politics.
Unsurprisingly, Senator Bernie Sanders has strongly embraced this U.N. report. Senator Sanders criticized my comment that the report was “patently ridiculous.” But when the U.N. takes sides in an American political debate and shifts resources from truly needy countries to prosperous ones, I fully stand by my characterization. All the more so when it’s largely American tax dollars that are paying for it.
In the past year and a half, the United States has cut almost $800 million from the U.N. budget by eliminating wasteful and duplicative spending. This is important because while America is just one of 193 countries at the U.N., we pay about one-quarter of the entire U.N. budget. When the U.N. wastes American tax dollars, like it did on this unnecessary, politically biased, and factually wrong report, we’re going to call it out for the foolishness that it is.
(With inputs from global governance watch)
