Fareed Zakaria: Mitt, You Need to Worry About the Poor

By Nicole Belle
from CrooksandLiars

Fareed Zakaria has had a lot of advice for Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He's already exhorted him to become more aware of the rest of the world and not be so myopic in his foreign policy. Zakaria has also tried to soften up the image of venture capitalists. And now, after his infamous declaration that he is not concerned about the poor, Fareed Zakaria implores Mitt Romney to think again:

We rank 31st of the 34 countries that make up the OECD in terms of the percentage of our population that qualifies as poor. Of the 34 member states, only Mexico, Chile and Israel are worse off than we are. The UK (at 11 percent), Germany (8.9 percent) and France (7.2 percent) are all much lower. The OECD average is 11 percent.

In case you're wondering how the OECD defines poverty, it calculates the number as the percentage of people who earn less than half of the country's median wage. It's an easy way to compare data across countries.

In the video above, look at the chart that shows the percentage of children in poverty. At 20.6 percent, we again come off far worse than other rich countries.

Japan, Australia, the UK, Germany and France all have much better numbers.

(More here.)