In almost all cases, “poverty hucksters” are deliberate liars.

These are people who make utterly absurd claims, such as there being more poverty in the United States than in comparatively low-income nations such as Portugal, Greece, Hungary, and Turkey.

The latest example comes from a website called Visual Capitalist. From what I can tell, the site is not pro-market or anti-market. It merely puts together charts in a visually appealing fashion.

But notice that this chart, which purports to show how many old people are poor in each nation.

It doesn’t actually measure poverty. Instead, you’ll see in the fine print (highlighted in blue) that the numbers are actually showing the share of old people with less than “half the country’s median household income.”

But this does not tell you who is poor unless you first know each nation’s median household income.

The same is true for this next chart showing the supposed poverty level for children.

As with the previous chart, it’s only when you look at the fine print (again, look for blue highlight) that you learn the numbers have nothing to do with poverty. Once again, what’s being measured is the number of kids in households with less than “half the country’s median.”

So what’s going on? Why is Visual Capitalist peddling dishonest data?

Actually, Visual Capitalist merely used numbers from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (a taxpayer-financed, left-leaning Paris-based bureaucracy). And the OECD has a track record of creating fake poverty data.

The OECD’s deceptive trick is to measure the number of people below the halfway  point of a nation’s median income and to then claim all those people are poor.

To show why this produces preposterously dishonest numbers, consider the example of the United States and Portugal. Looking at the two charts above, there supposedly is a greater prevalence of poverty in the U.S. – both for children and seniors.

Is this correct? Let’s start the answer by looking at ChatGPT’s summary of OECD numbers for median disposable income in both nations.

Since per-capita income is nearly twice as high in the United States, it certainly seems strange to think U.S. poverty is higher.

Here’s how the OECD tortures the numbers and why that bureaucracy’s conclusions are absurd. They calculate half the median income and they measure how many people are below that level.

Yet, as you can see, half the median level in the U.S. is far higher than half the median level in Portugal. Indeed, the threshold for supposedly poor households in America is almost equal to the average household income in Portugal.

I’ll close by giving Visual Capitalist a mulligan.

I’m guessing the author, Melissa Garside, is probably a graphic designer rather than an economist. She presumably had no idea the OECD has a track record of dishonest data manipulation.

For those interested in the truth, the key thing to understand is that poor people in the United States have living standards than are close to – or even greater than – the living standards of average people in other nations.

And the moral of the story is that the U.S. should not copy the failed policies of European welfare states. Unless, of course, the goal is for Americans to be as poor as Europeans (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).