Notoriously conservative Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is at it again. On his show “The O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday night, O’Reilly voiced the latest and greatest in his bizarre perceptions of reality: that child poverty and child hunger in the United States is a “myth.”

“You are telling me that you believe in the United States of America, with all the entitlement programs and food stamps and everything else, there are urchins running around that don’t have any food because of the system?” O’Reilly asked.

What I’m telling you, O’Reilly, is that in spite of decades of anti-poverty programs and welfare reforms, domestic poverty not only exists, it is rampantly plaguing the nation. In fact, among “rich” nations, the U.S. ranked second in the world for poverty at the turn of the 21st century, placing behind only Mexico.

Here are some hard facts for you:

There are currently 36.5 million Americans living below the federal poverty line, which is defined as having a yearly income under $20,614 for a family of four. It’s pretty difficult to wrap your mind around such a monstrous figure, so I’ll break it down for you: 1 in 8 Americans are living in poverty.

Of those 36.5 million Americans, 15 million are living in what the federal government characterizes as “extreme poverty,” meaning that they are attempting to live off of $10,300 a year for a family of four. Extreme poverty is more prevalent for African-Americans and Hispanics than for whites or Asian-Americans ("Urban Issues" by CQ Research).

More so, children are at a much higher risk for living in extreme poverty than adults. Despite children making up 1/4 of the U.S. population, children account for over 1/3 of the American population living in poverty. That means more than 16 million children in America are living in poverty.

As far as child hunger goes, 21.6% of American children live in a food insecure household-- that's 1 in 5 American children.

O’Reilly, however, would look at this numbers without a pang of sympathy. To him, these figures that detail suffering and economic inequality are nothing more than “baloney.”

“If you look at the studies of poverty, most poor people in this country have computers, have big screen TVs, have cars, have air conditioning,” O’Reilly said.

Consumer goods are an arbitrary and offensive way of measuring poverty. It is absurd to think that someone who is working a full-time minimum wage job, making below $20,614 a year to support his/herself, a spouse and two children, should not be considered in poverty or receive governmental aid because he/she purchased a television. Give me a break.

While O’Reilly might think that we’re considering too many Americans (or any, for that matter) to be living in poverty, I’m afraid to tell you that we’re actually not qualifying enough people.

Here’s a secret about how we measure poverty: Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration created a way to measure poverty in the mid-1960s by establishing what a minimally adequate food budget for families of various sizes would be and then multiplying those food budgets by three based on the assumption that food accounts for 1/3 of all expenditures.

This figure is adjusted for inflation each year and the incomes that are used for measuring poverty are considered before taxes. Despite being the basis for how the federal government measures poverty, Orshanksy’s method has been heavily criticized.

On July 13, 2008, the poverty rate in New York City was 18%. A day later, on July 14th, it was 23%, an additional 400,000 New Yorkers. The explanation behind this sudden upsurge in poverty? In reality, those 400,000 Americans didn’t plunge into poverty overnight. Mayor Michael Bloomberg simply amended that way he measured poverty in the city.

For our poverty problem, we have income inequality, lack of access to educational opportunities and structural racism to blame. Individuals like O’Reilly, blinded by their own privilege, need to wake up and realize: child poverty most definitely exists.