[skybrian]

These seem to be two different measurements of "extreme poverty," each of which is different from the world-wide definition used by economists in the original article:

"The UN’s numbers come from the official Census definition which has been kept for decades by the US government, defining extreme poverty as having an income lower than half the official poverty rate."

"Citing a recent survey of American households, Heritage found only 0.08 per cent of American households (or about to 250,000) are in “deep poverty,” defined by Heritage as living on less than $4 (£3) a day. This statistic does account for government social spending programmes which help the poor – like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance – while the figure cited by the UN does not."

I guess if you're going to memorize facts, you should also memorize definitions.