Let me do this by the numbers so that someone who is even as lazy and stupid as Flanagan can understand it. These figures are meaningless because the definition of poverty is always rising. This means that because the US is the “most powerful country in the world” even its poor are well-off by international standards, as the Census Bureau’s annual poverty figures for 2004 show. According to the Bureau:

Forty-six percent of all poor households own their own homes. The average home owned by persons the Census Bureau classifies as poor is a three-bedroom house with 11/2 baths, a garage and porch or patio.

Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The average poor American has more living space than the average resident of Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.

Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television. More than half own two or more color televisions.

Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

Seventy-three percent own a microwave oven, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

This is the kind of poverty Indians and Africans would kill for, and it certainly helps put into perspective Flanagan’s claim that “36 million people live below the poverty line”. Providing even more perspective is the fact that 36 million as a percentage of 300 million puts the number of poverty-stricken Americans at 11.7 per cent of the population. In 1998, however, the poverty rate was 12.8 percent. Can we now expect Flanagan to admit that the poverty rate has fallen under the presidency of the diabolical Bush? Don’t bet on it.

Anyway, what is the fundamental cause of child poverty in the US, apart from President Bush and his evil Texas cronies? The census data shows that children who live with married parents, irrespective of race, are less likely to live in poverty. For example, more than 95 percent of white children who lived with married parents in April 2000 had incomes above the poverty line. The same thing holds for minority groups: 88 per cent Asian and black children avoided poverty if they lived with married parents, while for Hispanics and Indians it was more than 80 per cent.

Research has shown that being fatherless is the major cause of poverty among children. Blacks suffer disproportionally because 70 per cent of black births are out of wedlock. This is an appalling statistic, but one that the ideologically motivated Flanagan chose to overlook. However, one should have thought that it would have drawn the attention of a self-professed man of God like Mr Wallis. Also missing from Flanagan’s propaganda piece was any reference to the 1996 welfare reforms that cut child-poverty by about 2.3 million, including some 700,000 black children.

These figures would get any reasonable intelligent person thinking. But Flanagan is neither reasonable nor intelligent. Closer inspection leads one to conclude that American poverty, at least as it is understood outside of leftwing dominated newsrooms, is largely a cultural phenomenon, driven by a broken work ethic and sexual irresponsibility. Child poverty could be virtually eliminated if every household with children had one adult working full time and married parents.

The Heritage Foundation found that the usual poor family with children works about 16 hours a week, irrespective of the state of the economy. This strengthens the view that the problem is really an attitude towards work rather than a lack of work. The Foundations calculated that if these households consistently put in a 40-hour a week something like 75 per cent of poor children would cease living in poverty.

Flanagan and Wallis’s statement that “45 million are without health insurance” is grossly misleading. Every American hospital is required by law to treat any patient, irrespective of whether they have health insurance. Moreover, this 40 million-odd figure, one that has been around for years, was debunked in May 2003 by the Congressional Budget Office that put the actual figure at 21 million to 31 million, which is about 10 per cent of the population at the most. These figures also include those who are entitled to Medicare benefits.

Regardless of Flanagan and Wallis’s sleazy attempt to suggest that some 45 million American would be completely without medical aid should they fall ill or have an accident, the situation is very different. A real journalist, which is something Flanagan will never be, would have checked his facts against Wallis’s charge. But I guess the creep just couldn’t give up another opportunity to slime the US and President Bush.

According to Flanagan, those who question Wallis’s figures are really accusing him “of inciting class warfare”. Rubbish. If they are at all charitable, which I am not when it comes to humbugs, they are criticising him for his sloppy research. But honest criticism is something the left cannot tolerate –– that’s why they try to slime it.

Flanagan finished with this revealing statement:

I agree with the American author [Wallis] that the great notion which was swept away during the years when market theory masqueraded as social philosophy was that of the public good. In reasserting that notion, we may have a new beginning.

This ignorant bigot clearly believes that the free market is incompatible with the “public good”. Wherever the market has been completely banished misery, tyranny, famine and gross inequality based on genuine exploitation has always been the order of the day. Just take a look at North Korea. The last century witnessed the death of more than one 100 million people by regimes that thought as Flanagan does.

Will the socialists’ terrible fantasy ever die?

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor