American and Danish poor are more similar than you might think

Most Danish people think that the poor in the US live on the streets and go to sleep hungry in their cardboard boxes every night. I stumbled on this great piece America: More Like Sweden Than You Thought by Tim Worstall of Tech Central Station via Johan Norberg. Unfortunately the belief of Danish people about stuff like this is hard to change after years of propaganda from the State education and State media.

A US left wing economic think tank has published a report in which they intend to show how bad the US system is and how the US should adopt more European (read Scandinavian) policies. Tim points out that the reports own figures actually show something very different, that really goes against the lefts traditional story.

The above graph basically takes PPP numbers (read Tim’s article for explanation) and take the top and bottom 10% of the population with respect to income and compare it to the median US income.

Now US has by far the largest income in the top 10% which to me is cool as it shows there is opportunity. Most socialists would say it is bad because some people have more than others. The interesting thing though is that the figures for the poorer 10% really doesn’t vary much between Scandinavia and the US.

The Danish press often report that 12% of the US population are poor and imply that 12% of the US population live on the streets and go to sleep in their cardboard boxes hungry every night. As I wrote last week in The lie that is the Official Poverty Rate nothing could be further from the truth. The above graph also really goes to show this as well.

The funny (or sad) thing is that Copenhagen actually has more homeless people per capita than New York City as I wrote about in The myths and fairy-tales behind the Danish welfare society last year.