In America, one in four children live in poverty — 2X worse than Australia, Britain and Canada

One surprising stat from Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in the NY Times:

In America, nearly one in four children lives in poverty; in Spain and Greece, about one in six; in Australia, Britain and Canada, more than one in 10. 

Digging in a bit, I found a UNICEF report that showed more detailed data. The US is the 2nd worst in terms of percentage of children living in poverty — the only industrialized country that's worse is Romania at 25%. 


In the end, the US spends less money on social benefits to the poor (1.1%) than most everyone else— the only OECD countries who spend less as a percentage of GDP are Lithuania, Latvia, Greece and Malta. Canada does a bit more at 1.4%, while Australia is at 2.4% and the UK leads at over 3.6% of GDP. 


During the great depression, the US poverty rate was roughly 32% — so we are off our all time worst, but only by about 10%!

News of the weird: Man's gut brews beer whenever he eats carbs

Toronto Star reports:

A Texas man in his 60s who would become drunk without touching a drop of alcohol turns out to have had a beer gut — his gut was brewing beer.

The unusual case study of Gut Fermentation Syndrome, a relatively unknown phenomenon also known as Auto-Brewery, was published in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.

Authors Barbara Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy detail how the man spent five years becoming unexplainably drunk before experts realized the cause was too much brewer’s yeast in his gut. A carbohydrate-rich diet caused an overgrowth of yeast, which would ferment the sugars into ethanol and make him drunk.