An encapsulation of the UN's overall worthlessness

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has a piece at NRO today on the idiotic UN report on poverty in our country.

The report demonstrates the collective cluelessness that arises when an international body is formed that gives equal weight to scum regimes and sane, grown-up countries trying to live by humane values and achieve the various forms of advancement that make their societies livable.

ast month, 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.

Everyone knows there is poverty in America. Thousands of public officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government attempt to address poverty, as they should. Thousands more nonprofit, charitable, and religious organizations honorably dedicate themselves to fighting poverty in our country.

Think about how this self-congratulatory assemblage of tyrants and grandstanders has chosen to spend its time, money and human energy:

 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.

Take a closer look at what the U.N. report says we should do about poverty. It reads like a socialist political manifesto of higher taxes, government-run health care, and “decriminaliz[ing] being poor” (never mind that nowhere in America is it a crime to be poor). 

The report also distorts and misrepresents the facts about poverty in America in ways that a biased political opponent might. For example, it states that 18.5 million Americans live in “extreme poverty” and 5.3 million live in “Third World conditions of absolute poverty.” In fact, these numbers fail 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. The truth is that America’s median household income has hit record highs. Wages have risen faster under President Trump for low- and middle- income earners than for high earners. And for the first time on record America now has more job openings than unemployed workers.

The best way for the US to proceed on any policy matter, from North Korea to African poverty to Iran-Arab tensions, is to ignore the UN. Leave it completely out of the proceedings. As an entity with  a mission distinct from that of any of the countries comprising it - well, that's not exactly correct; its mission hews pretty closely to those of, say, Venezuela, Iran and Russia -  it has not and cannot have any idea what a nation-state like the United States is all about. Its input is of absolutely no value.