Trump administration claims only 250,000 Americans live in extreme poverty, despite UN estimates of 18m

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The Trump administration has said the United Nations is overestimating the number of Americans in “extreme poverty” by about 18.25 million people, reflecting a stark disagreement about the extent of poverty in the nation and the resources needed to fight it.

In May, Philip Alston, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the UN, published a report saying 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty.

But rebuking the report on Friday, US officials told the United Nations Human Rights Council there only appear to be approximately 250,000 Americans in extreme poverty, calling Mr Alston’s numbers “exaggerated”.

The rift highlights a long-running debate among academics over the most accurate way to describe poverty in America, one with enormous implications for US policy-making and the nation’s social safety net.

It also sheds light on the ongoing feud between Donald Trump and UN officials over Mr Alston’s report on American poverty, with Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, last week calling the report “politically motivated” and arguing it “is patently ridiculous for the UN to examine poverty in America."

But who is right about the number of Americans in extreme poverty?

It depends on how you define it.

The UN’s numbers come from the official Census definition which has been kept for decades by the US government, defining extreme poverty as having an income lower than half the official poverty rate, Mr Alston said in an interview.

For 2016, that was about $12,000 (£9,000) a year for a family of four. By this criteria, the poverty rate in America has only slightly ticked downward since the mid-1960s.

The UN is using the Census figure which is “the gauge most people rely on when measuring extreme poverty,” says Mark Rank, a poverty expert at Washington University in St Louis.

But some on the right have long rejected this measure in part since it only counts income, or how much money each American receives.

Instead, American officials in Geneva cited survey data produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, which also measures purchasing power.

Citing a recent survey of American households, Heritage found only 0.08 per cent of American households (or about to 250,000) are in “deep poverty,” defined by Heritage as living on less than $4 (£3) a day. This statistic does account for government social spending programmes which help the poor – like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance – while the figure cited by the UN does not.

“No one likes the official poverty measure because it doesn’t count the enormous assistance we provide low-income Americans,” said Robert Doar, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank. “It makes you think they have very little - that they have nothing when in fact that’s not true.”

Several poverty experts acknowledged flaws with the official Census count, but described the Heritage statistic cited by the US as much too low.

Some questioned why $4 a day was an appropriate measure of extreme poverty, since it only translates into about $1,500 (£1,129) of spending for an entire year on food, health care, rent, and everything else needed to survive.

The Heritage number cited by the US also does not reflect the fact many families must go into debt to sustain spending, and government benefits like Medicaid and food stamps cannot be used to meet some unexpected expenses. Another criticism of Heritage’s data is that it is based on a survey of consumers which appears to produce different results than other poverty data, according to poverty experts.

“It’s a total joke,” said Mr Rank, the Washington University professor. “To say that there are 250,000 people in deep poverty in the US is just ridiculous.”

Other estimates have come in lower than the official US Census report but still significantly higher than the Trump team’s estimates.

In response to concerns about the official poverty rate, the Census in 2009 created a “supplemental” poverty rate which does account for government benefits like food stamps.

That number shows about 15.7 million Americans are in “deep poverty” in 2016, according to Gregory Acs, a poverty expert at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank.

Another convention for measuring poverty overall is to look at those with less than half the median national disposable income. By that measure, about 18 per cent of Americans are in poverty – higher than virtually all other developed nations, according to the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities.

A separate study from Princeton economist Angus Deaton, also cited in the UN report, found about 5.3 million Americans live on less than $4 a day, including government transfers.

“No one is claiming that there are 18.5 million people below $4 a day,” Mr Deaton said in an email. “It is hard to do this accurately, but I do think that using the survey data as Heritage does is certain to understate the problem.”

The US response to the UN argued poverty in America has fallen by 77 per cent “based on some measures of consumption” since 1980. Poverty experts say the claim is hard to square with the data.

“You can spend all day arguing about how many people are living on $2 (£1.50) a day vs $4 a day,” says Kristin S Seefeldt, of the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan.

“But if you spend any amount of time in poor communities in the US, it’s obvious there’s still a lot of deprivation and 250,000 is a ridiculously low number.”

The Washington Post