House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI)  Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

The United States ranks 34 out of 35 on a UNICEF measure of relative child poverty in developed nations. To be clear, that’s 34 out of 35 in the bad way—second highest level, doing better than only Romania with more than 20 percent of children living in a household with an income below half the median.

But the picture looks even worse when you examine just how far below the relative poverty line these children tend to fall. The UNICEF report looks at something it calls the “child poverty gap,” which measures how far the average poor child falls below the relative poverty line. It does this by measuring the gap between the relative poverty line and the average income of poor families.Alarmingly, the United States also scores second-to-last on this measurement, with the average poor child living in a home that makes 36 percent less than the relative poverty line.

This is the context before the start of sequestration, as Bryce Covert points out. With […]