This is an opinion column.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is ticked. A U.N. report on poverty in America is "misleading and politically motivated," she wrote last week.

It is "patently ridiculous" that the U.N. would even think of looking at the "wealthiest and freest country in the world," she wrote.

Poverty? In the richest country in the world? How dare you?

Oh, Nikki. I'd like to invite you to Alabama. Welcome to Wilcox County, Ala., the fourth-poorest county in America, if median household income is a measure that means anything to you.

Or come to Sumter County in the same Alabama region. It has the 10th lowest household income, and because of that can boast a life expectancy of 69.5 years - which is just a shade worse than Bhutan.

Patently ridiculous.

It's patently ridiculous that regions like the Black Belt, where populations have fallen so far in recent decades that barely more than 20 people inhabit each square mile, have been forgotten and ignored.

It's a place that seems more like a developing nation than a land of opportunity, where children are more likely to be born to single mothers and more likely to die before they learn to walk.

Infant mortality in Sumter County between 2014 and 2016 - as counted by the Alabama Department of Public Health - was the same as Ecuador.

Ridiculous.

Eight of the counties in Alabama's Black Belt are on the list of the 100 poorest counties by median household income, as counted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Four of them - Wilcox, Sumter, Greene and Bullock - are in the bottom 25.

The bottom 25. Out of more than 3,000 counties nationally. Ridiculous.

Ridiculous that hospitals are forced to close and services cut.

Ridiculous that a U.N. official who toured Butler County last year found the worst sewage crisis he'd seen in the First World.

It was Philip Alston, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights at the heart of Haley's ire, who marveled at the severity of that Alabama sewer disposal issue. It came up in the report.

"In Alabama and West Virginia, a high proportion of the population is not served by public sewerage and water supply services," it said. "Contrary to the assumption in most developed countries that such services should be extended by the government systematically and eventually comprehensively to all areas, neither state was able to provide figures as to the magnitude of the challenge or details of any planned government response."

Ridiculous.

But it's not just Alabama's poverty. It's South Dakota and the Mississippi Delta and the Appalachian Mountains and in South Carolina, where Nikki Haley was governor. Allendale County, S.C., is the 12th poorest county in America, with a median household income of $25,530.

Maybe you should go home, Gov. Haley.

It's ridiculous that we'd disguise our flaws rather than address them, that we vilify our poor rather than help them rise, that we criminalize them and hide them likely dirty dishes you don't want the guests to see.

We don't want to show them, because we don't value them. The report was blunt on that:

"Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century," it said. "Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done."

It is patently ridiculous, Ms. Haley. But only because it's true. And you would rather not see.

John Archibald is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.