More U.N. Lies about Poverty

October 22, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

In 2018, I shared a visual that I referred to as the western world’s “most depressing chart.”

 

It showed how the welfare state exploded in size after World War II and is now an enormous fiscal burden.

This has been bad news for taxpayers, of course, but also bad news for poor people since they get trapped in dependency.

I’m recycling this data today because I just read a report in Washington Post by Ishaan Tharoor about how the “far right” has been enabled by a “decline of the welfare state.”

Here are some excerpts.

 

…the United Nations’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights will deliver a report to the U.N. General Assembly on how cuts and curbs to welfare programs and social spending across the world have stoked popular discontent and, as a result, far-right politics. …De Schutter contends that there’s even more reason to widen and bolster social spending. …De Schutter, who is an independent expert appointed by the United Nations to advise on a specific issue, argues… “Welfare is not a luxury for a society, not something we can dispense with in times of crisis… Social protection is not just a cost, it’s an investment.”

I don’t like welfare for immigrants, but I also don’t like welfare for native-born people. So I’m not interested in the article’s political analysis.

But I care a lot about the fiscal burden of government, so I zeroed in on the mention of “cuts and curbs to welfare programs and social spending.”

This surprised me. I like to think I keep close track of fiscal developments, and not just in the United States. Yet I’m not aware of any shift away from the welfare state.

Did I miss something?

So I went to Our World in Data (the source for my 2018 chart) to get the latest numbers.

Lo and behold, the U.N.’s supposed expert is either a bald-faced liar or a blithering idiot. Social spending is still on an upward trajectory.

At the risk of understatement, it is absurd for the U.N. to complain about non-existent cuts. Indeed, it’s grossly dishonest.

Since I’m fair, I’ll acknowledge that the report also complains about “curbs” such as work requirements and anti-fraud measures, and at least some of those measures are real.

The bottom line is that I wish there were cuts in the welfare state. Government is far too big already and, because of demographic change and poorly designed entitlement programs, the problem is going to get much worse in the  absence of reform.

P.S. The chart show that there was a spike in social spending in 2020 because of the pandemic. But the U.N. bureaucrat who produced the report was not complaining about redistribution spending returning to the trend after all the COVID-related outlays. Indeed, if you read the report, there’s not a single mention of the pandemic. Indeed, do a search of the document and you won’t find a single mention of terms such as “pandemic” or “COVID.” Same for “coronavirus” or even just “virus.”

P.P.S. The United Nations has a track record of lying about poverty.