G20 Should Bail Out the Poor: Kristof

While world leaders waste bicker, the global economic crisis hurts more than your 401(k), Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times. The crisis will cause another 22 children to die every hour in 2009—and that’s the World Bank’s best-case scenario. So it’s really discouraging when European leaders indulge their “penchant for sniping at the Unites States instead of doing more to resolve the mess.”

“In London, Washington and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses,” said the World Bank president. In the poorest nations, “the struggle is for food or no food.” A week’s worth of interest on the $8.4 trillion in financial bailouts could all but eliminate death during childbirth, Kristof notes. The G-20 could address the poor with negligible sums—but instead, it’ll likely squabble as usual. (More G20 stories.)