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Friday, November 13th, 2015

Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are proof that poverty in the US doesn’t have to be this high

Author:     Dylan Matthews
Source:     Vox
Publication Date:     November 11, 2015, 10:30 a.m. ET
 Link: Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are proof that poverty in the US doesn’t have to be this high
Stephan:   Poverty has become a major issue in the United States, although there it almost no public meaningful conversation about it in corporate media, or amongst the Republican candidates for President. And no one wants to tell this truth: We have a much higher percentage of our population in poverty than many other developed countries. Here is some real data about this. Note also the commentary at the bottom of this report about the threat posed by migration -- something I have been discussing for over a decade.

Comparative poverty by nationEver since Bernie Sanders emerged as a major contender for the Democratic nomination for president, debate has heated up about whether the Nordic countries whose welfare states he celebrates — countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway — really do provide a better life than the United States. Critics insist that this is a myth. For instance, the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli and Brandon Wright assert that poverty actually isn’t lower in Scandinavia than it is in the US. That’s a big, counterintuitive claim: that for all these countries’ social spending, they don’t actually do a better job of taking care of their most vulnerable citizens than we do.

The problem is that this claim is false. Poverty is not just lower in Scandinavia than in the US, it’s dramatically lower.

Poverty is lower in Scandinavia — even if you use the US’s poverty line

Petrilli and Wright — in a column for National Review drawing upon a longer piece for the journal Education Next — attempt to show that the poverty rate in the […]

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