The report, released on Monday by Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, says 18% percent of US children (13.3 million) lived in poverty in 2016, accounting for 32.6 percent of the overall impoverished population. Infant mortality rate in the US is also 50 percent higher than that in other developed countries.

 

The risk that the black people in the US stuck in poverty is 2.5 times higher than the white and the infant mortality rates 2.3 times higher, according to the report.

 

The report says America’s policies in the past year seem to deliberately devise ever more obstacles to prevent people from getting needed benefits and punish the unemployed, while the massive tax breaks for the wealthy have extremely aggravated the inequality.